


The Ghost in Time

by ssenbonzakuraa



Category: GOT7, JJ Project, Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Inspired by Interstellar (2014), M/M, Showki Side Pairing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:21:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26697409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssenbonzakuraa/pseuds/ssenbonzakuraa
Summary: Jinyoung and Jaebeom love each other. It's true the way the brightness of a star is true. True in the way the existence of time is true. Where one goes, the other follows. This time though, this time, will Jinyoung be able to match the steps Jaebeom left behind...
Relationships: Im Jaebum | JB/Park Jinyoung
Comments: 20
Kudos: 30
Collections: GOT7 Alive Collection





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly a huge thank you to [pettypeachie](https://twitter.com/pettypeachie) and [tdystmr](https://twitter.com/tdystmr) for hosting this fic fest and helping a lot of us in getting our muses back. Secondly, my amazing editor [demonicwhitecat](https://twitter.com/demonicwhitecat), thank you so much for your time and patience.

_“Bhisma, has borne the great burden of the Kauravas, and with him, all that knowledge is about to set. That is the reason I am asking you to approach him.”_

Mahābhārata, Bhisma Parva, Bhisma-Vadha Parva, adhyaya 51, shloka 114

Jinyoung is perusing through the astrophysics section in the library. He’s seventeen and has recently developed a curiosity for the worlds beyond the translucent layers of the sky.

Muddying your hands in the rice and corn fields could only motivate you so much and only for so long before your heart followed your mind. Looking skywards is a new hobby; lying on the roof of his home, at times blessed by the beautiful green-white aurora gliding through the rich black sky. He has learned these auroras occurred planet-wide, once, until they came here and created their own uniform magnetosphere and these beautiful flashes of light got arrested to stay where they did back in their old home. Good for him, he thinks as he stares at them in wonder, thinks how far they have come and how far they can possibly go. Thinks of what lies beyond the heavens, to witness the most achingly beautiful and outrageously destructive events; from the birth of a new solar system to the cataclysmic death of a massive star in the constant turmoil of the universe. 

He’s rounding a corner in the section when he hears a thud behind him. Turning, he finds it was a holobook that had dropped to the ground. He goes to pick it up but is beaten by a boy around his age. The first thing Jinyoung notices are his eyes – slanted and severe looking, enclosing the high arch of a straight nose gracing an austere face.

“Were you looking for this?” The boy asks him. His voice is melodious like Jinyoung’s own but with the promise of a rich timbre of adulthood. Jinyoung is instantly curious.

“Were you stalking me?” Jinyoung counters, testing the waters with a teasing lilt to his voice.

The boy looks at his feet, sheepish, then rubs a palm through the nape of his neck. So he was, but Jinyoung had only meant it as a joke.

Jinyoung smiles at him and a peony blooms something wondrous in his stuttering heart.

He doesn’t know yet, but he’ll spend the rest of his life feeling them grow through the spaces between his ribs, coil around his bones and blossom something wondrous, nourished by the blood that runs only because of this boy. Like bougainvillea growing wild and rampant, a burst of formidable pink.

Like his whole demeanour changing, the boy smiles; severe eyes turning into crescents that makes Jinyoung’s heart soar. His thin lips unfurl around straight even teeth – a measured smile that somehow manages to be inviting, and there, because he had missed them at first, there are twin moles under his left eyebrow; twin little stars that Jinyoung thinks were meant for him to adore and his heart promptly plummets into his stomach. He doesn’t know it then but one day he’ll move universes for this boy.

∞

When Jinyoung wakes up, it’s to the same cold, empty bed. He turns and looks at the ceiling for a few moments; his stomach turning with the unsettling feeling of the dream. It was strange to have dreamt that, a very particular memory; one that opens the barrage to the rest.

He sits up, and there is the life-giving unconcerned sun seeping mellow and warm through his windows. Stretching, he walks to it, breathes in the slight metallic air and looks upon his sea of corn erupting from the rust red soil.

Jinyoung trudges to his kitchen for his morning coffee; the low surface gravity still makes his steps a little buoyant. Yugyeom is already there, back from his run and gliding his spatula gently through some eggs.

“How’s the corn looking?” Jinyoung asks.

“The corn is looking as it always looks.” Yugyeom says.

Jinyoung smiles at his brother’s wisecrack as he pours some milk into his coffee and takes it outside to the garden.

Twilight lasts a long time after the Sun has set and before it rises. The bright streaks of blue ice clouds, which formed during the night, glitter on the pinkish red sky of daytime, though, being in the vicinity of the rising sun, the sky still holds onto its blue. 

The outside walls of the duplex are lined with dappled willows and hydrangeas. Lush tufts of smokebush – that Yugyeom had planted when he was a kid – pop up besides the darling little peppering of arrowwood and ninebark and spiraea. Bushes of roses fill up the spaces where sun shines the brightest on their translucent petals and the fuzzy butts of bumblebees nestled within them at all times of the day. That light scatters aimlessly through the branches of the thicket of junipers and the bright gold of yew his house is hidden within.

There are berries of elder, winter and choke – a memento from Jaebeom – still growing lush and strong. For the finches and parakeets to peck on, he had said, and true to instinct they still hop on the branches to feast on them.

Jinyoung takes a seat in one of the wicker chairs and throws his head back to look at the sky. It’s a little chilly in the spring; there is a nip to the air. There’s a slight dusting of frost over the land. Even in the wistful chill, the morning is filled with the soft cacophony of the chirps of birds both near and distant. When Jinyoung breaths in to sigh, the crystalline smell of crisp morning air isn’t made any sweeter by the astringent scent of the roses.

On days like this, he searches for that half healed wound in his heart, slowly cuts off the sutures, and then digs his thumb in. It smarts, and that must mean he can still feel. He’s living and healthy, when his other half has ceased to exist. He’s living but he is not alive.

It has been ten years since Jaebeom left. Letting him go was tough, to allow his other half be ripped apart from him, to be lost to time. To duty.

Jaebeom was bound by it too; too proud to accept a fate handed to them when another possibility was well within his hands to deliver. 

At first Jinyoung had hated him, and in his anger had refused to think about him, like Amaterasu had refused to be in the same room with Tsukuyomi. But true love is that grief that never leaves. And Jinyoung had grieved that absence. Beyond that, there is nothing to lament. Jinyoung understands that too.

Such are the trials of love.

That is why to this day, the sun and the moon are never together.

∞

The Oculus on his dashboard blinks with an oncoming call. Jinyoung tells the Vrs. to accept it and immediately Yugyeom’s hologram comes to life above the console.

“Hey, hyung?”

He frowns. “Yugyeom? What’s the matter?”

“Our combines have gone crazy.”

“Did you tinker with them? I told you not to reset the GPS? I’ve told you, again and again, you have to-”

“I didn’t touch them I swear.” Even after his slight incense at having to be defensive has passed, Yugyeom looks like he’s having trouble broaching the subject with Jinyoung, and in turn, unfortunately, comes off guiltier than he intends to be. He stumbles, “You need to get to Brahmos.”

Jinyoung is stumped for a moment before he acquiesces without argument. “I’ll be there soon,” Jinyoung says. He logs off the call, looks towards the unending road then sighs deeply.

∞

Here in Lycus Sulci, in the northern hemisphere, spring is the longest season – twice as longer, and uneven; varying in months each year. Icy clouds move in from the east as Jinyoung drives the five kilometres it takes to that place which holds his unwanted memories. The Olympus Mons rises like Surtr in the horizon behind, guiding him, although the fire in his heart has died long, long ago.

Brahmos is nestled within a grove of fortifying banyans on all sides with the yellow of witch-hazels peeking from within them. Jinyoung remembers about that quaint cafe lined with the red of dogwoods where he used to frequent with Jaebeom.

Even when he’s pulling up to the gate, Jinyoung can see the tops of the combines gathered around the gates of the university. Another one comes out of the cornfield circumferencing the grove, as he parks and gets out of his Creta. 

Yugyeom is standing near the gate, hands on his hips. His eyebrows are creased together. At the sound of the SUV’s tires crunching on the gravel driveway, he looks up, heaving a sigh of relief. There’s another man standing next to him. Only when Jinyoung has walked closer does he recognize Hyunwoo.

“Hi hyung. Long time no see.” Jinyoung says in greeting, labouring a smile.

“You’re the one who has become the stranger.” Hyunwoo huffs and gives him that same exasperated smile.

“They’ve just been pulling out of the fields and heading here,” Yugyeom says as Jinyoung joins them. “Think your ghost’s messing with the equipment now?”

Jinyoung gives him a look. “Something could be messing with the compass,” Jinyoung murmurs. “Like a shift in gravity...”

“Or magnetism.” Yugyeom quips.

“That doesn’t make sense. Gravity doesn’t just change like that,” Hyunwoo says, “I think the magnetism is more likely...”

“It’s not. If the uni was built on magnetic ore,” Jinyoung says, cutting Hyunwoo off, “This would’ve happened the first time every single heavy equipment outside got turned on. Leave alone all the equipment inside the labs. It didn’t. Something changed.”

Yugyeom crosses his arms. “So how are you going to fix it?”

“I don’t know, I’ll figure something out,” Jinyoung says wearily, “It probably has something to do with the compass and GPS systems.”

He turns to leave when Hyunwoo interrupts him. “You know we could do with you back in the team,” Hyunwoo says carefully.

“That life is no longer for me hyung,” Jinyoung tells him, a hardened look crossing over his features, “Let’s go Gyeomie.”

∞

It’s the weekend and Jinyoung and Yugyeom are out for a football match. Jinyoung opens a paper bag full of his favourite cookies. They’re not really his favourite, they were jaebeom’s but he left that fondness with Jinyoung. He picks out one and smiles bitterly at it; this little confectionary is supposed to have his fate hidden in its little belly. He bites into the crisp pastry and out pops a little strip of paper.

“ _Distance is just a test to see how far your love can travel.”_

Jinyoung stares at the patronising calligraphy for a moment. It is as cryptic and as riddling as these always go, but there is such a sense of foreshadowing in it that it renders his skin into goosebumbs. Suddenly angry, that he had let a slip of paper get to him, he crushes it and tosses it away, choosing instead to focus on the match. He hadn’t spent some quality family time with Yugyeom in a long while and he wasn’t going to ruin the beautiful day. He looks up at the sky and asks it for some small kindness.

Before Mars was terraformed, during the northern winter solstice – with the planet's closest approach to the Sun –occasional global dust storms were triggered, sometimes lasting up to several weeks. The whole planet got blanketed by fine particulates dispersed in its thin atmosphere. Nowadays the dust storms last only for a few minutes, though they are irritating, and a hassle to clean the house after.

One moment they’re cheering for their team and another they’re watching the brown smoky behemoth hurtling towards their town.

They don’t make it back home before the storm hits. Yugyeom sets the windshield wipers going, but all the purpose that serves is to push the dust around. Dirty brown wind batters the sides of their SUV, sending it swaying from side to side on the road. They watch people standing on the sidewalks run inside for cover. The vehicles have their headlights and dippers and taillights all switched on as if it were evening already.

“Yugyeom, did you leave any windows open at home?”

Yugyeom looks guilty for a second. “I might have,” he gives a sheepish smile.

Jinyoung sighs, “Okay. I’ll clean it up, but I’m sleeping in your room tonight.”

Even with the tempest battering on them, they somehow make it home. Yugyeom runs to the door covering his head with his jacket, Jinyoung following closely after shouting at him to get inside quickly.

Every single surface has a thin lining of dust on them. Jinyoung foregoes the cleaning and climbs the stairs up to the first floor and sure enough, his bedroom window is half-open, and dust is blowing in through the crack.

Jinyoung slides it close immediately, turning to go and bring the broom to sweep away quite the mound of dust when he notices it.

There’s something on the floor.

When he makes it to his room, Yugyeom finds Jinyoung standing stock-still near the window, staring transfixed at the floor. He goes past his hyung and closes the window. But the particulates of dust still hang in the relative quiet of the room.

“What’s wrong hyung?” Yugyeom asks.

He points at the ground, at lines where dust is falling unnaturally fast, streaming down through the air, as if pouring through a gap in someone’s palm, collecting on the floor in a pattern. “The ghost.”

“Hyung...”

Jinyoung shakes his head. “Get a pillow and shake it out. Put it in your room,” he says as he walks away without a backward glance.

“Shouldn’t we clean it?” Yugyeom asks.

“I’ll do it tomorrow.”

∞

He can’t sleep. Jinyoung knows he won’t sleep unless he sees it again – the pattern on the floor.

There is that disconcerting feeling again, in the back of his head, that someone was trying to speak to him; was speaking to him. Whispering through space and time to try and send him a message.

He gets off the bed, carefully, so as not to wake Yugyeom up, and silently walks to his bedroom.

The dust sitting there calls to him in whispers; it’s always the quiet whisperings of his curiosity – his ghost, its voice muddled through the resistance of the barriers that separate them. And therein lies the truth of it, that Jinyoung is not supposed to get curious, to not notice the signs, to not hear those whisperings. But he carries Pandora’s curse with him. It’s difficult to not put his mouth around the lure, around the hook within it. His curiosity impales the roof of his mouth and snags him near and he finds himself sitting in front of it, limbs akimbo, as if about to meditate.

He stares at the pattern of dust: thick and thin radial lines, like a circular barcode.

Someone is trying to tell him something, through a language they both understand, that he’s sure of. But the lethologica of his mind stops him from finding out what and there’s nothing he can do but wait until it comes to him.

“It’s always dark under the lamp.” Jinyoung murmurs to himself, recollecting what his father used to say. You’re looking for something, and it is right in front of you, but you never consider seeing it.

The possibility that communication could be that simple, when you’re both thinking alike.

∞

“Hyung, I’m taking the car around town to see the conditions, see if everyone is okay,” Yugyeom says, popping his head into his room.

The pale pink light of the morning is still pushing away the glittering blue of dawn. It bleeds in through the window, bathing Jinyoung in its sepulchral light. He looks like a sceptre too – pallid, worn-out, wandering sleepless eyes. Yugyeom sighs, knowing when his hyung had left the bed, knowing how long he has sat here near the message from his ghost.

“Hmm...?” Jinyoung asks indifferently, eyes still on the pattern.

“I’m going out. Check out the town.”

Jinyoung turns to regard his brother and it’s then that Yugyeom’s words register. He looks around the room to notice that it is morning already. He hasn’t slept the night. His eyes burn when he blinks, he blinks some more to try and take away their stickiness, and he realizes his brain is in dire need of some coffee. 

Jinyoung rubs his face with his hands to get his bearings. “Wait, I’ll come with. Don’t leave without me,” he says.

Jinyoung steps away from the lines to see them all at once, one last time before he cleans it up. The realization comes to him so quickly he gets a whiplash. He runs to the notebook on the dust-covered comforter on his bed, looking between the notebook and the lines of dust.

Yugyeom is unsettled for a second at Jinyoung’s hysteria but decides to keep quiet.

“It’s binary. Thick is one, thin is zero. They’re number pairs...” Jinyoung says, pointing to the thick and thin radial lines. He holds up the notebook to show Yugyeom.

“Okay...” Yugyeom is incredulous, but he knows he has no right to judge his brother’s genius even if it scares him sometimes. Even if he thinks that his brother must be suffering something much graver.

“They’re co-ordinates. Supergalactic coordinates.” Jinyoung says, his eyes glittering.

“To where?” And he feels like a coward, like an enabler, for letting it go on for this long and still he can’t find it in himself to ask Jinyoung to stop.

“I don’t know.”

∞

Jinyoung sits up straighter. Yugyeom has his head lying on his folded arms on the table. There’s a robot in front of them, one of those industrial, granite brick-like things with a screen on its chest that passes for a ‘face’. The robot rolls forward on its blocky legs and looks at Jinyoung as if it were in a stare off with him; trying to bully Jinyoung’s eyes lower.

And why wouldn’t it. From its build, it looks like one of those that were developed here for the military – or something that passes for one out here where a need to protect borders is no longer required. Leave it to his professors to use up resources on unnecessary things.

Jinyoung didn’t want to come here where the memories of Jaebeom are still fresh, still left untouched. He was done with this life the moment Jaebeom told him he was leaving. But Brahmos is still his best bet to understand what these discrepancies are all about, because by now he is for certain that it is not some run-of-the-mill planetary phenomenon that can be afforded to be brushed off.

Still, he doesn’t want to be here; forgiveness never came easy to him.

It’s the principle of the thing.

“Jinyoung,” says a familiar voice walking into the room, cutting off anything Yugyeom was gearing up to say.

Jinyoung looks up with a frown and immediately stands up. “Kihyun hyung.”

Kihyun grins, “It’s nice to see you, Nyoungie.”

“Don’t know if I can say the same,” Jinyoung shrugs.

Kihyun smirks, then gestures at the empty seats to Hyunwoo who has come along, “Please, sit. We’ve got a lot to discuss. Like why you think there are gravitational anomalies going on.”

“I just....have a feeling. That’s all,” Jinyoung says, looking at a smiling Hyunwoo once then taking his seat. Yugyeom looks at him wearily.

“No one just has a feeling, Jinyoung,” Hyunwoo says, “You came here of your own accord because you have reason to believe there’s something else going on. Don’t think I’ve forgotten about those combines of yours. What I need to know is if you know more than you’re letting on.”

Jinyoung stares at Hyunwoo. “I think coming here was a mistake,” he says, getting up from his seat, “I don’t know about you, but this feels more like an interrogation to me, hyung.” He smirks then, pointing to the disquieting room he and Yugyeom were kept for the past hour and the hulking robot still standing guard next to their table.

“Sit down, Jinyoung,” Hyunwoo says, voice conveying there was no time for Jinyoung’s stubbornness, “We need you to work with us here.”

Jinyoung sighs and sits back down, “It’s hard to explain. I think there’s an anomaly with the gravity and the sudden dust storm that blew by earlier this week was a result of it.”

“Dust storms have always happened,” Hyunwoo uptalks.

Kihyun looks at Hyunwoo, nods and says, “Might be just a coincidence.”

“Doesn’t feel like a coincidence to me,” Jinyoung cuts him off.

“Gravity?” someone asks entering their room, too loud and too cheerful, and completely unable to read the sombre mood.

“That’s what I said,” Jinyoung regards him.

“This is Jooheon,” Hyunwoo tells him, “He came here from Jörð,” He looks at Jooheon once, “For research.”

“What kind of gravitational anomaly?” Kihyun asks, interested to know where this was going. Jinyoung has information they need, he realizes. He had locked himself up in the outside world, away from the usual business of the facility for this long. There was no need for him to come here unannounced all of a sudden and that raises red flags in Kihyun. That Jinyoung is hiding something, and if he notices how desperate they are, Jinyoung will use it against them. Jinyoung was a lot of things, but never not petty.

“I think this conversation is absolutely riveting,” Jinyoung says, meeting Hyunwoo’s eye. And true to Kihyun’s suspicions he says, “But I’m not telling you anything until you tell me what is going on here.”

Beside Jinyoung, Yugyeom stays mercifully silent.

Hyunwoo sighs as he looks at Kihyun. He stands up. “Come with me,” he says and ushers Jinyoung and Yugyeom out of the room.

They walk through a hallway Jinyoung remembers that leads to the particle physics labs. Cutting a corner they arrive at one of their old lecture halls. He’s led inside and immediately his eyes flit to the gallery.

Jinyoung still remembers he and Jaebeom sitting together up there attending a class. Remembers smiling conspiratorially into their notebooks, until they got asked to share their joke with the class by the professor. Can still feel the phantom warmth of Jaebeom’s thigh next to his own.

When Jinyoung looks down, sitting there is the Director and Jaebeom’s supervisor.

“Hello Jinyoung.” Prof. Daggubati says.

“Hello Professor.” Jinyoung says calmly, yet unable to stop his voice from pushing through his teeth.

Professor Daggubati Atharva, particle physicist and the man who took Jaebeom away from him.

“Jinyoung, how have you been?” the Director of Brahmos and his own supervisor asks.

Alexei Volkov was a stoic man, bald, with his Ūrdhvapuṇḍra running from the tip of his nose up to the edge of his forehead. He was an astronomer, patient in his bearings and carrying the weight of a guilt Jinyoung never understood, never questioned. A man of science finding respite for that guilt on borrowed gods.

“As well as I can be, Professor Volkov.”

“Take a seat Jinyoung, we have much to discuss.”

∞

Yugyeom shifts uncomfortably beside him when Jinyoung takes a seat and waits with bated breath. Yugyeom hasn’t studied here; he went all the way to Jörð, their university of agriculture, like Jooheon had, but unlike his brother, had decided to live the happy farmer’s life. He doesn’t understand how dangerous a place like Brahmos can be. How people in this university can be remorseless and selfish and still walk with their heads held high all because they thought they knew about what was the best for their species. Confident in their understanding that only they had the monopoly over altruism.

Jinyoung runs his hand soothingly along Yugyeom’s back. “Of what I know, you promised the people of this planet, ten years back, that you all will stop using up resources unnecessarily to fund your galactic expeditions,” he says tersely.

“Terraforming isn’t a long-term solution,” Director Volkov says, “We are overstaying our welcome here. It just wasn’t announced publicly because there’s still time yet. We have to take radical decisions and make sure the livelihoods remain seamless. Public opinion is that, space exploration is a waste of time and resources. They don’t want us to make the same mistake our ancestors did on Earth,” Volkov pauses, considering Jinyoung, “But our species has to continue. It is imperative.”

This is what he hates about his professors. They say things differently; sometimes cogently, sometimes cryptically, sometimes clumsily and at times contradictorily. Spontaneous answers aren’t given anymore to the public or the press, when what gets used is in bad faith and amplified as the less than ideal one. Serves them right he thinks; they love to be contrarians even at times where there is no argument.

Jinyoung looks at Prof. Daggubati in askance.

“Come walk with me,” the good professor tells Jinyoung, taking his cane from beside him to stand up, “You can leave Yugyeom here, he’ll be fine.”

Reluctantly, Jinyoung stands up, patting Yugyeom on his back. Hyunwoo smiles at him reassuringly as he follows Prof. Daggubati back into the hallway.

“We need warmth to grow wheat, terraforming has allowed us to have optimal temperatures but the planet is telling us it’ll soon go back to how it used to be,” the professor says, leading Jinyoung through the maze of laboratories.

“The dust storms?” Jinyoung asks.

The professor nods. “The dipole magnets are showing wear. The atmosphere is leaching nitrogen, the legumes are suffering and in turn the okra is. But you’re a farmer now. You know all about that.”

Jinyoung nods stiffly.

The professor opens a door that leads into a large, humid room. It’s a makeshift lab by the looks of it, clearly set up by people from Jörð. Clear plastic covers are draped over little aluminium trays serving as plots for various crops – corn, rice, okra, wheat, beans. There’s a man kneeling next to the okra, the knees of his pants stained with soil. He marks something down on a clipboard and touches the okra’s wilting leaves. Next to it, the saplings of wheat are showing decay.

Jinyoung remembers how Jaebeom always griped about a planet majorly of rice eaters relying too much on corn and wheat.

“Corn and rice is all we have left,” Prof. Daggubati continues, “But soon, that’ll be gone too. Our atmosphere exists because we made it. Do you know what happens if our magnets fail?”

Jinyoung frowns, looking at one of the plots of corn. The husks are brown and shrivelled. Too much heat.

Everything grew lush and green in the slightly higher co2 in the atmosphere and chlorinated soil that was treated so their food could grow. But it seems now, it was all taking a toll on the planet.

Most intellectuals back on Earth had argued against terraforming Mars, that it would be both unethical and unscientific. Stressing that it would snuff out or fundamentally alter a native ecosystem that may have arisen here on Mars and any attempt to colonize it would only make things difficult for the humans in the long run. That is, until they were asked to shut up.

“If we don’t starve first, we’ll suffocate,” The professor frowns.

Jinyoung looks at him. The man is stressed, that is clear and it is not a moment to rub salt on anyone’s wound but Jinyoung cannot help himself, when his own wound smarts every time he looks at the professor. “That is the world we created, Professor.”

“When you say this is the world we created, did you forget the part that we created it, out of nothing?” Prof. Daggubati says, clearly offended, “We’ve always found a way in the past.”

“Then how is this time is any different?”

“It’s not,” the professor says and walks back out into the hallway. He walks to another door at the end of it. Though he limps, his face shows resolution. “We have a plan,” he says as he opens it.

Jinyoung stares at the ship with the two Rangers attached to it, sitting in the middle of what used to be the lawn from what he remembers. He and Jaebeom used to have their little picnics sitting under the shade of the huge stocky banyan that is gone now; though he will not miss the stupid topiaries of boxwood that lined the lawn.

The entirety of it has now been turned into a hangar. 

The facility is huge, definitely consuming a lot of energy. Their distance from the sun stops them from being overly dependent on green energy; the solar irradiance not enough to power the entire population even with next generation Perovskite cells. Most, if not all of it, runs on nuclear power. At least, Jinyoung thinks, they’re keeping their planet clean.

Jinyoung looks at the space around the hulking craft in the middle. It has been years since Jinyoung has seen a space shuttle, let alone be in close proximity to one. He hears Jaebeom’s excited voice telling him how much fun he has had flying one, how the controls had felt under his hands, how wondrous it had been when he had exited the atmosphere. Jinyoung feels an instinctive need to get away.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Prof. Daggubati says, “The last components of our one versatile ship in orbit – Arjuna. Our final expedition.”

“Apt name. But happened to the Garuda vehicles? There were eight of them,” Jinyoung asks absently, watching workers climb around the ship, tinkering with it.

“The _Ragnarök missions._ ”

Jinyoung ignores the implications of that. “Sounds cheerful,” he scoffs.

“It’s the cycle of life. For a new beginning, there has to be an end.”

Jinyoung looks at his professor sceptically, “There is no planet in our system that can support life and we haven’t been terraforming Europa or Enceladus, that we only assumed, may have life in that primordial soup under their thick layers of ice. The closest system that can support human life is thousands of light years away.” Jinyoung shakes his head and looks at the shuttle again. Though terrifying, Jinyoung will agree, the thing is beautiful. “Trying to reach there doesn’t even qualify as futile...” Jinyoung stops when he realizes he’s missing something and turns his steely gaze at the professor, “Where did you send them, Professor?”

“That information is classified,” Prof. Daggubati says, “Unless you agree to come back here and work with us.”

Jinyoung starts. He had been waiting for that. Prof. Daggubati has always been an unrelenting man, always drew a hard bargain. A man that wouldn’t bend even for the will of the gods. Refused to accept their fate like he refused to accept defeat to the sarcoma growing inside his bones. Jinyoung could accept the trade off, knowing full well he couldn’t walk away. Those were the kinds of cards a man like Prof. Daggubati placed on your table.

“You were leaving without me anyway, Professor.”

“And you were chosen to come here, at the nick of time,” he says, pointing to the Ranger. “’They’ chose you, Jinyoung.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

∞

Back in the lecture hall, Kihyun puts up the hologram of solar system and the rest of them sit around it in the front row. “We started detecting gravitational anomalies almost thirty years ago, mostly small distortions to our instruments, mostly in the upper layers of the atmosphere. You probably remember studying about that, don’t you?”

“The constant plane crashes,” Jinyoung murmurs, “Our satellites kept messing up too.”

Jinyoung stares at an image of Saturn and its rings and moons around it. Kihyun zooms in on a space beside it; some stars are distorted like ripples in a pond.

A disturbance of space-time out near Saturn.

“Is that a wormhole?” Jinyoung asks, unimpressed, “You expect me to believe I’m looking at a wormhole?”

“It appeared twenty-eight years ago,” Kihyun says, smiling.

“A wormhole isn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon, hyung.”

“Someone placed it there, and whoever ‘they’ are, they appear to be looking out for us.”

“You simply cannot believe this to be true,” Jinyoung looks at the director, “Professor Volkov, tell me you actually don’t believe there’s a wormhole just sitting prettily there, for twenty-eight years, next to Saturn.”

The director only looks at Jinyoung silently, pursing his lips and looking guilty and that is answer enough for him.

“Where does it lead?” Jinyoung asks.

“Another galaxy.” It’s Prof. Daggubati who answers.

“That wormhole lets us travel to other stars,” Kihyun adds, “They’ve put potentially habitable worlds within our reach. Seven, in fact, from our initial probes. I’ll agree it’s strange that it came along right as we needed it, but we’re not in a position to ask questions.”

“So you sent probes into it?’ Jinyoung asks incredulously. He never got a whiff of it when he was a student, and his professors had to be involved in this project when he was still a student here.

“We sent people into it.” Prof. Daggubati says.

Jinyoung looks at him and then it dawns on him.

Ten years ago.

“The _Ragnarök_ missions,” Prof. Daggubati continues, “Seven possible worlds. Seven Garuda launches, carrying the bravest humans ever to live, led by the remarkable Dr. Jung.”

Jinyoung grinds his jaw listening to the professor’s account of the mission, as if all the men and women hadn’t just given up their lives, and for what, a doomed species. 

“Each person’s landing pod had life support for two years,” Kihyun explains as his eyes do a double-take to find Jinyoung glaring at him, “But they could use hibernation to stretch that, making observations on organics over a decade or more. Their mission was to assess their world, and if it showed promise, send a signal, bed down for the long nap, and wait to be rescued.”

“And if their world didn’t show promise?” Jinyoung asks

“Hence the bravery,” Prof. Daggubati says.

Jinyoung interlocks his fingers tightly and looks at the desk, not trusting himself to look at any of them. “Because you don’t have resources to visit all seven.”

“Yes,” Kinhyun says.

Jinyoung bites into his tongue.

“Data transmission back through the wormhole is rudimentary, simple binary ‘pings’ on an annual basis to give some clue as to which worlds have potential. Life has some basic requirements. It could exist anywhere in the universe that has liquid water, a source of heat and energy, and copious amounts of a few essential elements – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and potassium,” Kihyun explains glancing at Jinyoung’s lowered head, “One system shows promise.”

“One?” Jinyoung scoffs, twirling a pencil. “Kind of a long shot, don’t you think?” he asks rhetorically.

“One system with three potential worlds?” Hyunwoo says, speaking for the first time since they assembled in the room. “That’s not a long shot Jinyoung-ah.”

“No, but it is a bit implausible.”

“That’s why we have a backup plan,” Director Volkov says, scrunching his forehead. “There’s plan A and there’s plan B. Did you notice anything strange about the launch chamber when you were there?”

Jinyoung cocks his head, remembering, puzzled at the vast chamber and the structures built sideways around the curved walls; it all slightly resembled a centrifuge. Only in a massive scale. “This whole facility is a.....it’s a vehicle? A space station?”

“Both,” Director Volkov smiles, “We’ve been working on it, and others like it, for twenty-five years. That’s Plan A.”

It doesn’t seem like a viable solution to Jinyoung. “How does it get off the planet? We have never tried something in this scale.”

“Those first gravitational anomalies changed everything we knew about gravity. Suddenly the idea of harnessing gravity was real. So, Prof. Daggubati and I started working on the theory and we started building this station.”

“Prematurely?” Jinyoung says, “But you haven’t solved it yet.”

“That’s why there’s a plan B.”

“A population bomb,” Kihyun explains, “Almost five thousand fertilized eggs, weighing in at just under 900 kilos.”

“How will you raise them?” Jinyoung asks.

“With equipment on board we incubate the first ten. After that, with surrogacy, the growth becomes exponential. Within thirty years we might have a colony of hundreds. The real difficulty of colonization is genetic diversity, and we are not short of that.”

It’s ridiculous. Jinyoung wants to laugh; each passing minute makes his head pound at what he’s hearing. The audacity of his seniors and professors to cook up a plan of this magnitude and actually think it would work. That’s when he remembers something. “Is this why I was nutting in a test tube for the last few years?” he asks, looking at the people gathered in the room and laughs finally. “It wasn’t really a mandatory routine check-up was it?”

“No it wasn’t,” Kihyun smiles wryly.

“Plan A is still alive and breathing. It’s not like we have given up on it,” Director Volkov says, then looks at Prof. Daggubati, “We’re still working on the equation, to use them to our advantage, but we should have it figured out by the time you find us a planet.”

“Forgive me, but Plan B sounds even more improbable,” Jinyoung says, unconvinced.

“That’s only if Plan A doesn’t work. And it will.”

“Don’t drink the kimchi soup first, professor.”

“Do you think we’ll fail, Jinyoung?” it’s Prof. Daggubati who asks him.

“This is more than your pride professor.” Jinyoung stares at Prof. Daggubati who stares right back.

“You’re not the only one intimately acquainted with loss, Jinyoung,” the professor scolds, “I too stand to lose a lot, and I still choose to put my treasure on the line because I believe the planet depends on us and that is why we must make sacrifices.”

“Because we know better?” Jinyoung scoffs.

“No, because we have no right to ask anyone else. It is burden of knowledge and we have to carry it,” the professor then relents, “Your fiancé understood that too. That is why he agreed.”

“That’s a lie and you know it. You leveraged my love for him to do your bidding. You leveraged his sense of duty to send him the gods know where,” Jinyoung screams.

Hyunwoo sensing things getting out of control goes to Jinyoung and walks him out of the classroom.

“Hyung...” Jinyoung says, sobbing right onto his plams, “What do I do?”

“I think you have already made a decision, Jinyoung-ah,” Hyunwoo answers, then smiles when Jinyoung looks at him with tired, wet eyes.

∞

Once upon a time, Yatsukamizuomizunu, the God who created Izumo, looked over the Land of Izumo. He began thinking, “This country is like a thin, long piece of fabric. Let's find some land to sew onto it to make it bigger."

That was a myth, or history, however one chooses to look at it. But some people – people back on Earth – believed that stitching lands together was indeed possible.

After the wars ended the skies turned a fathomless grey. There was no sun in sight for days. There were no seasons; the skies didn’t pour, the flowers didn’t bloom, the trees didn’t shed. There was only the constant winter. Not the pretty crystalline blanket of mirth, not the lazy warmth of being huddled together, not the smoke billowing out of laughing mouths.

This was a stagnation. And the only constant in this stagnated life was death; death and the grey fuming cold.

And then came the green.

There was green everywhere. Having no choice but to adapt to the circumstances in which the plants found themselves in, they grew; vengeful and wrathful, laughing in the faces of those that championed for it, driven by the unshakable faith that the Earth was theirs. So much green, that one wondered if nature had taken offence against the patronizing tone of her favourite creation – the one which had now thought above her, as is the norm of children that grow up above their stations. And with a firm hand she showed them their place in the unliveable, untamed world.

After the wars ended, the people understood too late that there should be more than one world view to the planet’s problems. More than the hegemony of a hemisphere. No more building a world on the corpses of giants.

The jewel above the Atlantic, where once masters revelled in their arts, was a wasteland. And from its embers grew beech and fir; dense and luscious from the radiating earth, finding nourishment from the corpse of the ideological fallacy that it was the center of intellectual thought – one that imposed the rigidity of love, of worship.

Of time.

After the wars ended, there were people who forced others to stop looking up at the heavens for answers. Not in a theological sense, no. But what lay beyond their blanket of clouds. Of the impossible worlds that lay miles and miles away beyond their tranquil moon.

There were a people though who believed it was a brilliant piece of propaganda. That the Soviets bankrupted themselves pouring resources into rockets and other useless machines and if they didn’t want a repeat of the wastefulness and excess of the twenty-first century, the children needed to learn about Earth, not listen to fairytales of leaving it.

But, as with everything, time had its own plans.

After the wars ended, there were people who wanted to leave and people who wanted to stay. The sun rose unbeknownst, the trees blossomed uncaring and the people who woke to it first decided to leave, tired of being held by their hands and made to follow the whims of a few who thought they knew better. And miles away, on the opposite hemisphere, the few others quietly followed. Engineered their own selves, to exist in a place that wasn’t meant to be tamed and yet it was.

It was cowardly and despicable to have left the rest to their fate. But there was a point at which one decided to stop living by rules imposed upon them by whom they thought lesser. Now the kings and queens of tribes were kings and queens of a planet. And ones who wanted to rule by their one true book, one true thought; one true everything were free to proselytize to the abundant green.

They severed the already threadbare ties and decided to leave their home for a new one they created for themselves – for their own rules, for their own culture, for their own independent thought.

It was a snapping of ties between siblings and in the end, a family lay torn.

∞

“Do you know what mom used to say to me?” Jinyoung asks, sitting down next to Yugyeom. He looks up at the sky and further up there is Cygnus, their true north. Just like Jaebeom was his. “After she had you, after she got sick, she told me that parents are only meant to be memories for their kids.”

Yugyeom smiles a resigned thing, one end lifting up in defeat. He picks up his notebook where his hyung had solved out the binary code. By now, Yugyeom is certain; his hyung has it by heart. “If you have to go, just go. Don’t worry about me.”

“I thought that mom couldn’t possibly be right. But I know now what it’s like to become a memory.”

“You don’t know when you’ll be back, do you?”

Jinyoung looks at his hands he rubs them for warmth and as if wanting to not answer his brother, he looks out into the field around them. They’re still lush and green, and healthy, bearing their harvest. He imagines the same field, but their corn in decay, brown and wilting.

“You don’t know if you’ll be back.” Yugyeom says in understanding.

“You’re my responsibility Yugyeom,” Jinyoung stares at his brother and finds him smiling back at him.

Yugyeom raises an eyebrow at Jinyoung, mocking, “Really hyung? I stopped being your responsibility a long time back. And I know you’ll not be able to sit here quietly now that you know about the mission.” Yugyeom too then looks out at the fields, “You weren’t made to live here in the dust and mud hyung, you were made for the stars.”

At that Jinyoung tears up. He feels the pressure of loss like a hand circling his throat, closing around the lump of grief lodged there permanently. He has a decision to make – to leave the only person tethering him to this planet, or run after a ghost across he knows not which end of the universe. Only because he is now duty-bound too, just like Jaebeom must have been. Life has come full circle to that same moment, only now he has to be the one to bear the burden of holding something sharp. He has to be the one to snap the ties.

The tightness of it crushes his chest. How long will he be away from Yugyeom? A year is 669 sols. He’ll probably be away for decades.

But Yugyeom makes his decision for him. “To move forward, we have to leave something behind, hyung. Don’t you always say that?”

∞

The next morning finds Jinyoung sitting in his bed and staring at his bookshelf. They’re an unnecessary installation if Jinyoung is honest; he could’ve easily installed an AI and gotten whatever information at his behest to be suspended on air for him, but Jaebeom had wanted one in their house, seemingly attached to the excesses of their ancestors.

He walks to it and picks up a watch sitting on one of the shelves; it’s an artefact truly. An old analogue watch – a gold casing enclosing a black dial inlaid with thick and thin lines of gold and three gold hands that told the time; the rudimentary science of their ancestors. Jaebeom had given it to him before he left, said he’ll be back for it. Then two years passed and he didn’t come back and the watch stopped working; the second hand oscillating between two lines. The leather of the strap had worn out too, so Jinyoung had stopped wearing it, had felt like a good idea then not to be reminded of hope his every breathing moment.

Jinyoung pockets the watch, still attached to it the way he was attached to everything from the past, even when the memories at times were painful – of Jaebeom placing the watch on his palm, of Jaebeom giving him one last kiss, of Jaebeom walking out, then a few of his books had dropped out of the shelf on their own and Jinyoung had been haunted ever since.

He looks up at his bookshelf again and says a silent prayer for a sign that just won’t arrive. Perhaps his professors were right to call it ‘them’, a superhuman tribe that is looking out for their species, a scrap of altruism in this wide, wide universe.

But it never felt like people to him, more like a person.

Yugyeom comes in then and breaks his reverie, to tell him Hyunwoo has arrived to pick him up. He looks at Yugyeom with his red rimmed eyes and Yugyeom, like the gift he has not allowed himself to cherish, smiles and allows him his time.

He doesn’t want to leave the house, a sanctuary that he and Jaebeom had painstakingly created. But it’s better not linger, to delay the inevitable. He has to leave and he doesn’t know why he’s biding his time looking for answers in his bookshelf.

He stands up and turns to leave when there’s a thudding on the floor. He feels a strange sense of déjà vu before he pivots around. He looks at the floor where the books have fallen out then at the bookshelf on the wall of his room. The books didn’t fall uniformly from the row.

There is a pattern. A row of books separated by alternating wider and thinner empty spaces. He looks at it for a few moments, memorizes it – cannot help but – and walks out of his room.

∞

“We have liftoff,” Hyunwoo says. He’s their pilot and commander of the mission. “Approaching Mach One.”

A swastika is drawn on their Ranger. Jinyoung knows it is to imbue them with sanctity, prosperity, power, and the life force of fire or for simply luck if he trusts his professors. Though he doesn’t know if it’ll be enough for the mission they have so bull-headedly embarked upon. 

“Everyone okay?” Kihyun asks, gripping his seatbelt with white-knuckled fists. A chorus of ‘yes’ and ‘ _good’_ echoes throughout the cabin. “Everyone accounted for?”

“All here, Kihyun-ssi. Plenty of slaves for my robot colony.”

Jinyoung looks at the robot, confused. It’s the same one from back at Brahmos, the one he was in a stare-off with.

“They gave him a humour setting so he’d fit in with his unit better. He thinks it relaxes us,” Kartikeya explains from her co-pilot seat. She’s a Major like Hyunwoo, and an engineer too. And Prof. Daggubati’s daughter. His only child.

“A massive, sarcastic robot,” Jinyoung muses, “What a great idea.”

“I have a cue light I can turn on when I’m joking, if you like,” K.E.N., the robot says, regarding Jinyoung with his smart-screen that serves as his ‘face’.

“Probably help,” Jinyoung agrees

“You can use it to find your way back to the ship after I blow you out the air lock,” K.E.N. says looking at Jinyoung. A beat, and an LED turns on near his smart-screen.

Jinyoung shakes his head.

“Stage one separation,” K.E.N. tells Hyunwoo, “Preparing for stage two.”

“How long until we’re out of the atmosphere?” Jooheon asks, craning his neck to see the window around Jinyoung’s seat. He’s sweating under his suit a little.

“That’s going to take a little time, Jooheonnie. I thought you ran through simulations for this?” Hyunwoo asks.

“Simulations are completely different from the real thing, hyung.”

“Stage two separation,” K.E.N. informs them, “All the feeds are going manual.”

“Alright,” Hyunwoo says, placing his hands over the controls, “Roger that.”

“Handing over the controls,” K.E.N. says.

Jinyoung relishes flying again, even if he only does relatively menial things for the time being. He remembers the simulations he took part in with Jaebeom back when they were at university, remembers his first real flight. He hadn’t been as happy as Jaebeom had been, realizing too late that it meant uprooting his dreams of an eternity with Jaebeom. That it meant he’d be losing Jaebeom to the stars. His love for the endless beauty of space hadn’t tasted as sweet then.

Still, he cannot deny the thrill of anticipation runs up his spine.

“We’re three minutes out from the Arjuna,” Kartikeya says from in front of him. Jinyoung blinks himself out of his reverie, watching their ship loom before them, in the glittery darkness of space. Jooheon looks at him wearily.

The rangers approach a ring module already in orbit – a wheel of twelve boxy modules with a docking port at the hub. All they have to do is fire the retro-thrusters and slide gracefully into the center of the ring – two Landers (for heavy-lift cargo drops to planet surfaces) and two Rangers (fast and agile single-stage vehicles for reconnaissance and planet landings) nestling inside its ring module completing the last piece of a large modular craft: the Arjuna.

“We’re locked.”

“Helmets on, people,” Hyunwoo says. He flicks a switch, “Initiating spin.” The retro-thrusters silently fire on the Arjuna and it starts rotating.

“We’re at thirty percent of our needed RPM,” K.E.N. says, “Approaching One G.”

Hyunwoo grins, “How’s the gravity treating you guys?”

“Uh,” Kihyun says, “Could be worse.”

“Could be better,” Jooheon grumbles. “Do we have Dramamine?”

Nobody answers him.

“Sixty percent,” K.E.N. tells them.

Director Volkov’s voice crackles in over the comms. “We’re going to lose direct communication like this in a second. Thought I’d say goodbye. You all will be in hypersleep for most of your journey.”

“Things look good for our trajectory. Nine months to Jupiter, counter-orbital slingshot around it and then 14 months to Saturn. Give or take, two years,” Kartikeya runs the length of their expedition through the professor again, voice unexpectedly chipper.

Jinyoung tunes them out for taking an inventory in his head. Two years. That’s all it takes. Just two years and he will be so far away from the last of his family. By the time they’re at Saturn, Yugyeom will have completed university. “Professor Volkov,” Jinyoung says suddenly, cutting off whatever Kartikeya was apprising the director with. “Make sure nothing bad happens to Yugyeom.”

Director Volkov doesn’t say anything for a minute. “I’ll do my best, Jinyoung.”

“We’ve reached one hundred percent of our needed RPM,” K.E.N. informs them just as the artificial gravity gets reinstated.

“We’ll see you when you get back,” Director Volkov says, “We’ll be older. But we’ll be wiser and we’ll still be here.”

“Goodbye Professor Volkov,” Kartikeya says softly.

“Strange that your father wasn’t the one to wish us farewell,” Jinyoung retorts. She makes a face at Jinyoung in answer.

Jinyoung casts a long look at the spinning red planet below him through the window. He wishes he could know exactly where Yugyeom was and what he was doing. He wishes he were able to know when he’d be able to dig his feet in the red soil again.

Jinyoung wishes for a lot of things. But at one point you have to stop wishing, understand the transience of those thoughts and then dig your toes into reality instead, and prepare for the long battle. And though Jinyoung feels painfully unprepared, he’s ready.

The Arjuna’s main engines fire off then, the craft pushes out of orbit, accelerating away from Mars.

∞

Cryo pods feel like sleeping inside the womb; being carefully cradled by the placenta, lulled in the darkness by the amniotic fluid.

However, in reality, they look like coffins. Too foreboding for a bed to sleep on travelling through space, and nothing as beautiful as a mother’s womb. But they are necessary – to slow the aging process of the human body, so that they do not incur excessive senescence and not overly consume the limited supplies while on their mission. Hypersleep pods, as long as they have power, are capable of preserving and reanimating them even after decades, although at the cost of serious mental and physical side-effects. To keep them in suspended animation until rescue arrives, most astronauts choose to set a ‘waking date’. Sometimes they don’t.

Jinyoung is sitting next to the one that he’ll sleep in for two years.

“You doing okay?” Kihyun asks, handing Jinyoung a bottle of his customized nutrient pills. They’re preparing to bed down for hypersleep.

Jinyoung shrugs with one shoulder, “I think so.”

Kihyun sits next to him as he swallows two of them and pops a squishy bubble of water to wash them down. Behind them, Hyunwoo’s already asleep, a monitor softly beeping in time with his heartbeat. 

“This is going to slow your heart rate too,” Kihyun says, pointing to the supplement, “You’ll get a little sleepy after some time. Let me know if your chest starts to feel tight.”

“Alright.”

Jinyoung takes a breath and tries to feel the sedative taking effect. He stares at the wall as Kihyun’s warms his arm. 

“Relax, Jinyoung,” Kihyun says, a chuckle hidden somewhere in his voice, “Lie down in the pod if you don’t feel any adverse affects and try to fall asleep. Don’t fight the drug.”

“I’ll tuck myself in later,” he says and tries not to think about how he’ll be asleep for two years. Two years that will be gone in a blink of an eye.

Nodding Kihyun leaves him to his devices. Jinyoung picks his holopad and pulls up a map of the system they’re heading toward. He frowns remembering something; he looks around and finding himself alone turns back to his holopad and feeds the supergalactic coordinates into it.

A read little dot pops up – a holo of a red planet not unlike their own.

“That is Prof. Goldstein planet,” Jooheon says, taking a seat beside him. His initial anxiety forgotten and replaced with a dramamine aided steadiness. “She taught in your department. Did you have classes with her?”

“No, we didn’t. She was probably busy hiding things from the citizens.”

Felling he was taking his pettiness too far; he prods Jooheon to continue, hoping to banish the etchings of disappointment in his face. The boy is young, younger than Yugyeom even and Jinyoung wonders what his professors had said to convince this kid to rope him in on the mission.

“Next up is Prof. Matsumoto Ren’s planet,” Jooheon tells him, “He was the head of the terraforming department before he joined the mission.”

Jinyoung nods at the blurry image of a dark blue planet.

“We don’t know a lot about these planets,” Jooheon continues, “Whatever data we have gathered is from what little the wormhole let through to us. Prof. Goldstein’s seems to have a lot of flat land, dry and arid like Mars used to be. It looks very promising. Then there is Dr. Jung, the best of us.” He replaces the screen image for a grainy, white orb. “Remarkable man. He inspired eight people to follow him on the loneliest journey in human history. Scientists, explorers... He was Prof. Daggubati’s protégé.”

“When you say Dr. Jung, you mean Jung Taekwoon?”

“You know him?”

“Yeah he was a senior.” And Jaebeom’s personal hero. “None of them had family?”

“No. No attachments.” And that singes a bit. “They knew the odds against ever seeing another human being. I’m hoping we surprise at least three of them.”

“You’re talking big for someone who almost wet their pants, panicking at takeoff,” Jinyoung smirks, then turns to Jooheon fully to regard him. The kid is younger than him by almost a decade, and he’s here without having to be convinced.

Jooheon sighs, “Out there we face great odds. Death. But not evil. That’s what comforts me.”

“Nature can’t be evil?”

“Formidable,” Jooheon says, “Frightening even, but not evil. Never cruel. Is a tiger evil because it rips a gazelle to pieces?”

“The fear is just what we bring with us, then.”

“This crew represents the best aspects of humanity. Have some faith, hyung.”

“Are we really the best of humanity? We are five people and a robot. We’re going to fly blindly through a wormhole that was made by who knows what...whom?” Jinyoung points out, “All in search for a habitable planet on the other side,” and he sounds so pragmatic that Jooheon is caught off guard for a second.

Jinyoung shakes his head and looks out at the diminishing Mars floating in the void. So alone. And there is Earth beyond it, further away; the perfect planet and they were never going to find another one like her.

He remembers his first date when Jaebeom had taken him to one of their planetariums, remembers making a fool of himself; crying when he first laid eyes on the holograms of the Earthian sky – rich, endless azure, inlaid with soft white woolly clouds. 

“We are a species of missed chances,” Jinyoung sighs, “Never learning to appreciate what we have until we lose it.”

Jooheon has heard of him, hard not to when they’re the only two people his professors in Brahmos talked about. Jaebeom and Jinyoung, the twin young virtuoso; jewels in the field of space science. Though he never got to meet Jaebeom, nothing could’ve truly prepared him for the other half.

Jooheon has read all the research papers, has heard all the stories, but actually meeting Jinyoung – the exalted astrophysics prodigy – has been an experience. The man is not what he had expected; where he had thought of meeting someone excited for this mission, he has met someone too jaded to care about the future, like someone holding a grudge with the heavens.

Park Jinyoung, Jooheon thinks, looks like a man robbed by time.

“We have to lose something in order to gain something. We have been desperate for a rock to cling to while we catch our breaths. And always in that desperation has laid our greatest triumphs. We are stupid like that, I’ll agree. Our three prospects are at the edge of what might sustain human life. We have to find that rock.”

At that Jinyoung finds Jooheon’s voice catch, as if holding himself at the last minute from disclosing more. “What is it?”

Jooheon shifts in his seat, sighs and rubs at his forehead before speaking. “There is Hreiðarr Eriksen’s planet, further out from our system. Vasundharā. A second Earth; as large as Jupiter. Four moons – Víðarr, Váli, Gríðr, Gersemi and Saturn-like rings around her.”

“You already named them?” Jinyoung scoffs in disbelief.

“Yeah I guess if you’re the first one to name something, then you have intellectual rights over it.”

“Driven by the unshakeable faith that that new land is ours too?” Jinyoung asks, trying and failing not to be scornful at their audacity.

“I hope so,” Jooheon says, missing Jinyoung’s derision, “For the sake of the future of our species at least. Esther Goldstein’s planet will not be able to hold us. Not for long. Like Mars couldn’t.” Jooheon looks at him, “We are connected to Gaia. It’s like an unseen umbilical cord that attaches us to her. We can go find a foster home for our species, terraform it for a synthetic atmosphere, create a biosphere custom made to our liking, but we’ll always long for her, because we came from her. So it’s in our best interest that our future continues in Dr. Eriksen’s planet.”

“Godspeed.” Jinyoung smiles at him. Jooheon smiles back.

Later, Jinyoung clambers into the cryopod, lies down on the risen metal skeleton of the bed. Jinyoung closes his eyes and tries to relax inside the heated water of his sarcophagus. The bed lowers and the water rises up to his ears. A sheet of plastic pulls over him, completely enveloping his body and sealing the air and water inside. The metal lid of the cryopod closes, completing the seal and activating the hypersleep function. He feels his limbs being weighed down. He imagines the stars hurtling past him, the cold dark of space around him. He lets himself drift off.

∞

The Arjuna has settled into an orbit around the ringed giant. It looks like a tiny speck of dust next to it.

Between the day before and the day now, two years have somehow passed. Jinyoung rubs his eyes; he feels tired, feels like he was barely asleep at all. Except he was. He has slept for two years while they hurtled through space. Solitary explorers, on the greatest ocean of all encased within millimetres of aluminium.

He doesn’t expect to feel any different when he wakes up. He’s still the same man who had been told he was necessary on a supposition. He’s still unchanged; unconvinced about this tragedy they have hastened on.

The man who, in his grudge, in his arrogance, has declared his species’ case hopeless.

When he walks into the observation deck, the knife-edge of Saturn’s rings is visible through the window. They’re unfathomably large, beautiful even in their desolation; the ripples of shattered moons and comets reach out into the universe. It makes Jinyoung feel small and insignificant just to look at it.

Jinyoung looks over Keya’s shoulder; she’s flicking through images of star fields, distorted as if through a fish-eye lens. “Is that from the relay probe?”

“It was in orbit around the wormhole. Each time it swung around we got images of the other side of the foreign galaxy.”

“Like swinging a periscope around?”

“Exactly,” she smiles.

“So we’ve got a pretty good idea what we’re going find on the other side?”

“Navigationally at least.”

Hyunwoo’s voice comes through the comms telling them to suit up; it’ll be less than forty-five minutes until they happen upon the wormhole. Jinyoung wonders if he’ll be able to see it from a distance. If he’ll be able to tell just by looking at it that it is a disturbance of space-time.

“Strap in, I’m killing the spin,” Keya tells him, as the Arjuna streaks past Saturn. It stops rotating as it heads for a distorted blur of stars.

∞

There is a portal, cutting through space-time, letting them see into the heart of a galaxy so far away they couldn’t even guess the loci of it in the universe. Jinyoung is not reassured by it when he stares at the wormhole as they approach: it looks like a massive spherical lens.

It is beautiful as it is simple; a bubble suspended in the vacuum, the galaxies reflecting on its surface like tiny luminescent fireflies. A glitch existing in space-time even when matter and antimatter tried to pull it apart. So tenacious and humble, Jinyoung wonders if someone did put it there.

“Who do we have to thank?” Jooheon pipes up from beside him.

“I’m not thanking anyone till we get through it in one piece.”

“How do you think it’s going to feel inside it?” Jooheon asks after a pause, not looking away from the wormhole, “I mean. It’s subverting all the laws of physics, right?”

“Technically it shouldn’t feel any different to how we’re feeling now,” Jinyoung says, “The wormhole isn’t bending the laws of physics; it’s only bending the space around the physics.”

That makes Jooheon turn around and frown at Jinyoung, “What is that even supposed to mean?”

“It’s like this,” Jinyoung says, pulling up a hologram of a graph, “Normally, to get from one side of space to the other, you’d have to travel this whole distance.” He demonstrates by the end-to-end length of an axis. “But a wormhole folds space in half,” he folds the hologram like a paper in on itself, “And travels through,” he stabs a finger through the folded hologram, “Like that.”

Jooheon stares at the image, “That’s…”

“As simple as it is efficient,” Jinyoung says as he turns his attention back out the window. The wormhole has gotten closer, looming over them. “How much longer, K.E.N.?” he asks.

“Estimated time of arrival to the wormhole threshold is four and a half minutes.”

“That’s not long,” Jooheon murmurs.

“It’s not,” Jinyoung agrees.

∞

Hyunwoo and Keya fly the Arjuna towards the wormhole. As it flies around, the view of the foreign galaxies lie in opposition, like an enormous mirror. It is extremely disorienting. But it is beautiful too, actually; the muted colors and lights. They seem to spiral around the ship, a kaleidoscope of stars and planets. 

Hyunwoo fires Arjuna’s retro-thrusters to slow, descending towards the wormhole. “Everybody ready to say goodbye to our galaxy?” He pushes the yoke forward, nosing down and letting gravity pull them towards the center of the wormhole.

Jinyoung stares down into the vast lens of the wormhole. The inside is spattered with distant lights and more empty space. It dwarfs the Arjuna as it drifts towards this rift in time and space, making Jinyoung’s previous glimpse of Saturn seem small in comparison. Everyone in the cabin looks through the window with rapt attention. Jinyoung glances at Jooheon and sees him with his nose practically pressed against the glass. His eyes are wide and wondrous, full of the kind of innocence that fades away with age. Jinyoung wonders if this is what Yugyeom would look like, staring out at the vast possibilities of the universe.

The Arjuna reaches the surface of the wormhole. As it crosses the threshold it becomes apparent that there is no surface, there is no boundary – as there should, between two media – that separates their galaxy from the one on the other side. The craft simply passes without interference into the space of the distortion which closes around the craft; its own warped reflection flickering towards it, as if the ship had dived into a vat of reflective mercury.

Jinyoung looks out at the distorted reflections bordering the bulk – a space beyond their three dimensions – as the Arjuna flew, seeming to accelerate as it hurtled through what could only be construed as a tunnel in the bulk, but without any exit in sight.

Jinyoung, awestruck, checks his instruments.

“They won’t help you in here,” Keya says, looking at Jinyoung, “We’re cutting through the bulk. All we can do is record and observe,” and startles at the shape in the air in front of Jinyoung – it is bending, warping to form ripples in space-time inside the cabin.

Jinyoung stares at the distortion in awe. It isn’t anything made of matter; it is as if the reality itself has taken a fluid shape, reaching for him.

“What is that?” Jooheon says in alarm.

Jinyoung reaches out towards the warped space. “I think... I think it’s them.”

Hyunwoo shouts at him not to, but Jinyoung doesn’t take his hand back, too hypnotized in wonder. He smiles as it moves towards his palm; as if a tiny animal reaching for his hand out of curiosity. It distorts his hand but there is no pain; there is no feeling of having any contact with matter of any sort. It feels like nothing. Jinyoung smile turns wider. “Distorting space-time.”

As soon as it had come to them, it goes away.

Streaks of light flash into their cabin again and Hyunwoo and Kartikeya watch the tunnel mouth streak towards them, a mass of stars and nebulae growing at far side of the wormhole.

When the Arjuna slides out of the wormhole, the comms and the instruments come back to life. Hyunwoo gears up with his hands back on the yoke.

“We’re ...here.”

∞

The cosmos is more crowded here; stars upon stars, nebulae growing and the bright light of a neutron star in the distance. A true cosmopolitan.

Kihyun calls up data on a workstation. “The lost communications came through; the relay on this side cached them.” He flicks through data – years of basic data – no real surprises. “Prof. Matsumoto’s site has kept pinging thumbs up, as has Dr. Taekwoon, but Prof. Goldstein went down, three years ago.”

“Could be a transmitter failure,” Jooheon says.

“Maybe. She was sending the thumbs up right till it went dark.”

“Prof. Matsumoto still looks good?” Hyunwoo asks. Kihyun nods and brings up a whiteboard to draw on.

“His planet is the nearest but there is one complication. The planet is much closer to Rudra than we had calculated.” A black hole, larger than they could have fathomed, and Prof. Matsumoto’s and Dr. Taekwoon’s planets orbited it. “Prof. Matsumoto’s is on the horizon, landing there could take us dangerously close to Rudra. A black hole that big has a huge gravitational pull.”

“I can swing around that neutron star to decelerate,” Hyunwoo suggests.

“It’s not that,” Jinyoung says, glancing around the concerned faces, “It’s time. That gravity will slow our clock compared to Mars’s. Drastically.”

“How bad?”

“Every hour we spend on that planet will be, maybe...seven years back on Mars,” Kihyun says.

“Look,” Kartikeya interrupts, “Dr. Taekwoon’s data is promising, but we won’t get there for months. Prof. Goldstein is even further. Prof. Matsumoto hasn’t sent much, but what she has sent shows potential – water, organics...”

“The stuff of life,” Jooheon says.

“How far off the planet do we have to stay to be out of the time shift?” Hyunwoo asks.

Kihyun indicates a spot on his white board. “Just back from the cusp.”

“So we track a wider orbit of Rudra, parallel with Prof. Matsumoto’s planet but a little further out, take a Ranger down, grab Prof. Matsumoto and his samples, debrief and analyze back here.”

“If we’re talking about a couple of years, I could use that time to work on gravity. The observations from the wormhole from this near are gold for us,” Jinyoung prompts.

“No, I think it will be better for Jooheon to stay here. He has more time in his hands and we cannot risk him down there.”

Jinyoung looks at him and wonders yet again why Brahmos allowed someone so young and vulnerable to come along on the mission in the first place. How is this young boy going to spend that much time in solitary confinement with only the Arjuna’s AI for company?

Jooheon watches Kihyun and Jinyoung look at him in distress. “I’ll be fine,” he tries to allay their fears, “I have more shuttles than you, two Landers and a Ranger, not to forget the whole ass ship.” He smiles rakishly before ending, “It’s you all who should be worried.”

Kartikeya scoffs at him before Hyunwoo grabs him by his neck to give him a noogie.

∞

As the Arjuna approaches it, Jinyoung looks out at Rudra – a sphere of shadow with its crown of glowing light that bent to its whims. It sits there quietly, lazing and awaiting with a latent hunger until an unfortunate star passes too close to its teeth. 

Jooheon peers over his shoulder. “A literal heart of darkness,” he says.

It is.

A region of space-time, deforming it in turn. As innocent as it is dangerous, and wouldn’t have been visible if not for its distorting effect on the light of stars that manage to not get caught by its unforgiving pull, though squeezed into a curved horizon that isn't even a real, physical boundary, not a membrane or a surface. Simply a threshold a particular distance from the singularity.

“If we could see the collapsed star inside, the singularity, we could solve gravity.”

They could, only if it weren’t sucking the waves of the cosmos into a region beyond which there was no return.

Jooheon points to a small glowing ball close to the glowing distorted region near the blackness. “There’s Prof. Matsumoto’s planet. Hopefully you’ll be able to take the Ranger down without any problems.”

And there it was, that annoying niggling in his brain. It has been there for quite some time and he hasn’t been able to put a finger on it, until it comes to him – Jooheon talking about how he has more crafts than them.

He turns to Kartikeya, who’s suited up and standing near the air-lock. “Major Daggubati, there were eight Garuda vehicles yes?”

She looks at him, face impassive. “Yeah,” she answers, not know why Jinyoung was bringing that up at that particular moment.

“And all of them were used for the _Ragnarök mission?”_

Kartikeya nods.

“But only seven planets have been found habitable. Where did you send the eighth craft?”

A terrible sense of foreboding fills him. He feels the shadow of Rudra looming behind him, like an old god that had come for reckoning and he feels powerless to the knowledge the god brings with him. Jinyoung feels his hairs stand on end. He shouldn’t have put words to his thoughts. Then perhaps the realization wouldn’t have come; perhaps then, he wouldn’t remember how obsessed Jaebeom had always been with gravity, obsessed to the ends of his wits.

“Dad asked...”

And that was all there was wasn’t it, an obsessed man living vicariously through another one. Both bound by their duty to their species and slave to their greed for knowledge. Never knowing where the end of the line was, when to quit.

“No. That will be all Major.”

Clenching his teeth, Jinyoung walks away from the cabin to get ready for landing.

∞

When the Ranger detaches from the ring module, Hyunwoo fires the retro-thrusters to slow and the craft drops. There is a terrible sort of weightlessness. Jinyoung feels his hands shake. The watch around his wrist is the only anchor that helps him through it.

The Ranger streaks down towards Rudra, leaving Jinyoung in awe at their acceleration.

Hyunwoo speaks into the comms, “You reading these numbers?”

Jinyoung studies the data that K.E.N. assimilated, marvelling down at the eerie blackness sliding beneath.

“No way to get anything from it?”

“Nothing escapes that horizon, hyung. Not even light.” Jinyoung sees from his periphery Kartikeya looking at him with guilt written plainly in her eyes. “The answer’s there, just no way to see it.”

The Ranger looks tiny as it streaks over the blackness, high above the glowing horizon. Prof. Matsumoto’s planet, gleams like a dark-blue world when the Ranger approaches it. An uneasy feeling pools in Jinyoung’s stomach when the craft starts to howl and shake as it begins to encounter the stratosphere. He takes another deep breath and peers out the window at Prof. Matsumoto’s planet, at the stagnant thin clouds.

The ranger cuts through cloud formations, bursting out into clearer air, high above an endless ocean. The crew peer at the sparkling water streaking below them. Just water; miles and miles of an endless ocean, and no land in sight.

“The stuff of life,” Kihyun jokes.

“I’m picking up a signal from Prof. Matsumoto’s equipment,” Kartikeya says, looking at the screen in her dashboard.

“Twelve hundred meters out,” K.E.N. interjects.

Hyunwoo studies the curving horizon, concentrating. “Okay,” he says, turning the Ranger towards the indicated location.

“Here,” Kartikeya points out, “This is pretty close to the signal. We can walk the rest of the way.”

Hyunwoo banks sharply and eases down. With a sigh of relief, Jinyoung undoes his seatbelt and stands up, stretching.

“Time’s ticking,” Hyunwoo says sternly, opening the hatch. “Let’s go, go, go...”

∞

The water is shallow, a feet deep at most. Kihyun, Jinyoung and Kartikeya peer into the distance. There’s the same smooth, ankle-deep water spreading into the horizon where a distant mountain range looms. They start wading towards it in their heavy suits, where K.E.N. had pinpointed the site of Prof. Matsumoto’s transmitting signal.

“The gravity’s punishing,” Kihyun says breathlessly.

“One hundred and thirty percent of Mars’s gravity,” Jinyoung tells him and pushes on ahead as the rest of them fall behind.

A few metres out K.E.N. stops. “Should be here.”

Jinyoung joins him, searching the shallows for some sign of Prof. Matsumoto’s craft. He looks up, confused, “The signal is coming from here isn’t it?”

K.E.N. drops to its knees thrashing under the water. It wrenches a piece of damaged equipment from the sea bed. Jinyoung looks at it. “His beacon.”

Kihyun joins him just as K.E.N. starts lugging the beacon to the Ranger. “Wreckage. Where’s the rest?” he looks around but all he sees is only water.

“Towards the mountains,” Jinyoung says as he wades to where he sees some wreckage floating in the distance.

From the cockpit of the Ranger, Hyunwoo stares out at the horizon just when he notices it. “Those aren’t mountains.”

Jinyoung is still walking towards the rest of the wreckage when he hears Hyunwoo’s frantic voice through the comms. “Jinyoung get out of there, walk back. Those aren’t mountains, they’re waves.”

Jinyoung pauses and looks at the mountains properly. The ‘mountains’ are moving, tiny lines of white sea spray are blowing from the tops of them.

Hyunwoo looks as the mountainous wave prepares to bear down on the Ranger, and in front of it, there is Jinyoung searching for the transmitter in the wreckage.“Jinyoung get back here,” he screams into the comms.

Jinyoung pauses, breathing in and looking at the mountainous wave hurtling towards them. In that very moment he is pulled between his resolve to do right by his species, duty bound to help, against his need to find a conclusion to the monotony of his heartbeat. It's a knife edge place to be – to want to exist, to want to disappear.

Teetering on that precipice, he makes a decision. “No, we need the recorder.”

Kihyun looks from K.E.N., who is loading the beacon in the Ranger, back to Jinyoung.

Jinyoung slips and slides along the current and the low gravity, but still keeps checking the debris. He refuses to accept that they have come this far but can go no further, knows they cannot leave without the data.

Beyond Jinyoung, Kihyun sees the mountainous wave approaching. “K.E.N, go get him,” he hollers at the robot as he starts running towards the Ranger. Kartikeya is already there, standing guard for them at the doorway.

K.E.N. takes off towards Jinyoung, who is trying to lift a piece of equipment from the water.

Hyunwoo swings open the hatch and stands in the doorway, peering out at the approaching mountainous wave. He looks at Jinyoung who now has pulled something heavy from the wreckage. He sees Jinyoung slip and the wreckage pin him down.

Jinyoung looks back at the Ranger, then looks behind and sees the mountainous wave, thousands of feet high and almost upon them. “Jinyoung!!!” he hears Hyunwoo scream for him.

“Go, GO,” Jinyoung screams, “I can’t make it.”

The wave rears up beyond him like a serpent. A thousand feet of wrathful water; resplendent in its beauty, crouching up to pounce on anything that has dared to come in its way. Jinyoung looks at it, enthralled as one would at a serpent – hypnotized – as it spread its hood, ready to strike.

Śeṣanāga.

Jinyoung suddenly remembers. One of the primal beings he had read about way back in school – that which remains when all else ceases to exist. Of how its uncoiling moved time forward and with it grew life, and how its coiling forced the universe to cease to exist.

In that moment, he wants it to coil around him too. Wants that magnificent wave to crush him, free him from this burden of carrying a snapped red string. Free him of the burden of carrying the one half of that love which remained with him as the other half dispersed within space and time.

If you ask him, Jinyoung doesn’t want to untie that string, doesn’t want to give it up at any cost. If he forgets Jaebeom, that love is lost permanently. Only because he keeps that string around wrist, tugs it tighter sometimes and makes it dig into his skin, does he know that the love still exists, that that love still connects him to Jaebeom beyond his understanding of time.

But he knows has to let go now. Maybe, perhaps, Jinyoung thinks, if they were so lucky, another Jinyoung and another Jaebeom in another universe would find it. And keep it – an archaic remnant of this abstract feeling floating in space-time.

So he closes his eyes, and waits for his life to play before him, hopes the last thing he’ll see is Jaebeom’s beautiful smile before his universe finally ends.

That is, until he feels the cubical, steel arms of K.E.N. sliding under his legs and waist and cradling him to its body and start running.

Kihyun stands midway, mesmerized by the sheer majesty of the liquid mountain until Hyunwoo shouts at him to run back.

“Keya! Come on! K.E.N. has her!” Hyunwoo shouts at Kartikeya, who is still standing out into the water near the doorway, watching K.E.N. run towards them with Jinyoung in its arms.

Kihyun turns, starts wading back through the water beating against his ankles. Two hundred metres behind, K.E.N. pounds through the shallows as Jinyoung looks up at the ever closer mountainous wave.

Hyunwoo jumps inside the cockpit. He powers the Ranger up, as behind him the wall of liquid fills his view. “Come on, come on,” he mumbles, as he sees the water right upon them. He runs back to the hatch where Kartikeya is still at the foot of the ladder. Kihyun runs fast and throws himself towards the hatch. K.E.N. trailing behind, jumps up the ladder, throws Jinyoung inside and turns for Kartikeya. The Ranger tilts, rises, and she is ripped from K.E.N.’s hand as water rages across the open hatch. Kartikeya is dragged under and away from them by the wave as the Ranger is pulled sideways up the face of the mountainous wave.

Kihyun and Jinyoung are thrown across the cockpit. K.E.N. grabs onto both of them and somehow pulls them to their seat while Hyunwoo holds onto his as the craft sways and sways on the wave.

The Ranger tilts over the backside of the wave, surfing for a second then pitching forward; tumbling down a thousand feet. Inside the cockpit they hang on for dear life, thrashed mercilessly in the tempest of Prof. Matsumoto’s planet.

The Ranger only comes aground when the wave leaves it behind on the momentarily still waters.

“What happened to Prof. Matsumoto?” Hyunwoo asks immediately.

Jinyoung tries to speak up, though still dumbfounded, still catching his breath. “Judging by the wreckage, he was broken up by a wave soon after impact.”

“How could the wreckage still be together after all these years?”

“Because of the time slippage. On this planet’s time, he had landed here just hours ago. He might’ve died only minutes ago.”

Kihyun indicates the beacon, “The data we received was just the initial status, echoing endlessly.”

Hyunwoo nods as he takes that in. He breathes hard once then takes off his gloves. “Jinyoung, I told you to run back.”

“We’re not prepared for this,” Jinyoung counters, deflecting.

“I asked you a question, Jinyoung.”

Jinyoung looks away. “We come this far in this half-baked mission, trying to find us another planet to colonize and now that we were here, you wanted me to leave without the data.”

“Exactly. We are here to find ourselves a new home. We are not here to get martyred. And because of you we already have one. My co-pilot is gone all because you have a death-wish.”

In the palpable silence they size each other up, like animals ready to pounce, both knowing they were right in their own place, compelled by their egos to feel the way they feel. Unmindful that in this clash of opinions, this blindness to perspectives, in this waste of rationality to anger they still have a comrade waiting for them, suspended in time.

It’s only when Kihyun tires of their face-off and tells them to shut up do they relent.

It’s a torturous hour and a half of sitting and waiting anxiously – first for the thrusters to drain and then for the Ranger to reboot its systems, get rid of the water clogging each and every crevice. Jinyoung hardly breathes through it all. For every minute that passes, he thinks of the months that have gone by on Mars.

The Ranger is mercifully quiet save for Hyunwoo wearing the floor down with his impatient walking. Jinyoung feels like his footsteps are disproportionately loud, echoing throughout the ship and further into the stillness of the waters. Until finally the Ranger gets back to a condition for take-off.

∞

Nobody speaks as Jooheon opens the airlock of Arjuna. He looks in askance as Hyunwoo ghosts past them into the hallway leading to the living quarters.

“You’re back,” he says, looking back at them almost in wonder.

“We’re back,” Kihyun responds.

Jinyoung shifts from foot to foot before he asks, “How… how long were we gone?”

“Twenty-three years.”

Jinyoung’s head lowers.

“Four months and eight days.”

Jinyoung shakes his head as he watches Kihyun hold Jooheon’s face in his hands.

“Why didn’t you sleep?” Kihyun asks him. Jooheon looks as young as they left him but his eyes betray how tired and vulnerable he has been all those years.

“I did a couple of stretches. But I stopped believing you were coming back, and something seemed wrong about dreaming my life away,” he smiles, “I learned what I could from studying the black hole, but I only know the theories but not the intricacies and nothing much gets out anyway.”

Jooheon looks around for their missing member. “Where’s Keya noona?” he asks looking into his hyungs’ guilt-laced faces.

Jinyoung frowns as his eyes flicker down. “There’s nothing for us here.”

∞

“Blood samples? Bone marrow? Cheek swabs? You also took those.”

Kihyun glances at Hyunwoo before saying, “Stem cells. Just in case things don’t go according to plan.”

“Are they teaching you to keep things from people in Aśvinau too? Like they do at Brahmos?” Jinyoung accuses.

Kihyun doesn’t answer, doesn’t look him in the eye, instead choosing to look at his husband. He finds Hyunwoo looking at him with a strange look.

The hostility between Hyunwoo and Jinyoung seemed to have carried on to Arjuna. They don’t speak much, especially to each other if they can help it. But with wills as unbending as theirs, it was imminent that the two would come at loggerheads eventually.

Back in their dining Hyunwoo had called for a meeting when an argument had erupted between Jinyoung and Kihyun. Hyunwoo hadn’t spoken a word and now when they were done, he promptly put the holograms of the remaining planets up – Dr. Jung’s ice world, and Prof. Goldstein’s desert planet.

“We don’t have the resources to visit both prospects. We have to choose,” Hyunwoo says as Jinyoung looks over at the data in his holopad.

“Yeah,” Kihyun agrees, “They’re both promising. Prof. Goldstein’s data was better, but Dr. Jung’s is the one still transmitting.”

“We’ve got no reason to suppose Prof. Goldstein’s results would have soured,” Jinyoung counters, remembering the circles in the sand and now knowing what they meant. “Her world has key elements to sustain human life.”

“As does Dr. Jung’s,” Hyunwoo counters.

“As did Prof. Matsumoto’s,” Jinyoung parries, “Prof. Goldstein’s planet seems like a better option.”

“And who told you that, your ghost?”

“Hyung, this is my field.”

“No, this is Kihyun and Jooheon’s field. When I last checked, you were an astrophysicist, not a doctor or an astrobiologist.”

“Then ask them. Ask them if I’m wrong.”

Hyunwoo doesn’t, he doesn’t even look at them, preferring instead to keep on pointlessly arguing. “You’re going to pick the one that you think will work based on an assumption. Why do you believe Prof. Goldstein’s is the better prospect, when we have Dr. Jung still transmitting data and his planet right under our noses?”

“Why? Rudra, that’s why.” Jinyoung steps to the suspended hologram of the icy planet. “Look at Prof. Matsumoto’s world, hydrocarbons, organics, yes. But no life. Sterile. We’ll find the same thing on Dr. Jung.”

Jooheon looks between the two of them, wanting to agree with Jinyoung, but stays thankfully quiet through the unease.

“Because of the black hole?” Kihyun asks.

Jinyoung nods at that, “Murphy’s Law. Whatever can happen, will happen. Accident is the first building block of evolution. But when you’re orbiting a black hole, not enough can happen. It sucks in asteroids and comets, random events that would otherwise reach you.” Jinyoung looks at their faces, Hyunwoo still not looking convinced. “We need to go to further afield.”

“Dr. Jung is there on the ground sending an unambiguous message that we should go to him.”

When Jinyoung tries to reply, Hyunwoo cuts him off, “You didn’t even want to be here, and now you’re questioning the one who came up with this whole mission? We’re only here because of him. And we have to be objective.”

Jinyoung turns back to the hologram, then looks up to stare Hyunwoo dead in the eye, “Well, if you’re wrong, you’ll have a very difficult decision to make. Our fuel calculations are still based on a journey to Prof. Goldstein’s planet. Strike out on Dr. Jung’s planet, and we lose fuel, and time. We’ll have to return home, or decide to somehow push onwards to Prof. Goldstein’s planet with plan B because only starting a colony could save our species from extinction.” He brings up the calculation beside the hologram of Dr. Jung’s planet. “You might have to decide between your own ego and the future of the human race,” he smiles bitterly, “I trust you’ll be as objective then.”

∞

In the end it is Hyunwoo’s ego that counts for more than Jinyoung’s instincts. Anger, you see, it is anger that doesn’t, usually, give you clarity, doesn’t let you look past your self-righteousness, doesn’t let you measure your words carefully before they leave your mouth.

Jinyoung doesn’t bother much about Hyunwoo’s decision, what does bother him is something deeply personal that Hyunwoo had brought up to shame him. His ghost. The ghost that had left a message for him in the spaces between his holobooks. Those spaces in his book-shelf laugh at him now. Try as he might, he hasn’t been able to decode what it says, and he knows it says something.

“Why don’t you try Morse?” Jooheon tells him. He has this ability to creep up on Jinyoung and, perhaps unmindfully, does it every single time he finds Jinyoung concentrating on his holopad.

“What?”

“You know, Morse? Dots and dashes?”

“I know what Morse is,” Jinyoung corrects, because he isn’t here to be patronized, “I meant why are you suggesting that?”

“Thick and thin lines can’t always mean binary,” Jooheon says matter-of-factly, “I mean, if you’re substituting ones and zeroes for them, dashes and dots can work too,” he trails off as he finds Jinyoung staring at him.

“Ok, I’ll try Morse then.”

And Jooheon being the pest that he is, doesn’t walk away. Instead, he lodges himself next to Jinyoung and watches him feed the data into the holopad. They wait the few seconds it takes for the permutations to run.

Jinyoung stares wordlessly as his heart drops a beat at the projection hanging in the air over the screen – one word, four letters.

It reads ‘S T A Y’.

∞

Jinyoung eyes the stratosphere of Dr. Jung’s planet – layers of large, mountainous cloud, as the Ranger drops through them. The Arjuna is up there, lonely, kept into orbit by the AI around the silvery white globe of Dr. Jung’s planet.

In the cockpit Jooheon studies a heads-up display of cloud density and peers out, concerned. The Ranger cuts through one cloud, banks left and scrapes against the next one. A few panels tear away from the wing. Jooheon looks at Jinyoung, then at Kihyun in the co-pilot’s chair. Kihyun looks back at them, turns at Hyunwoo once but doesn’t say anything. They understand for what these are – solid ice formations. The clouds, if one can still call them clouds, are thick slabs of frozen land suspended in the air.

They try to keep their composure as best as they’re able until K.E.N. indicates the beacon’s position. This is it; either this will be their new home or some compromises will have to be made.

The Ranger’s gear lowers as it comes to rest, tentatively, at the surface of what looks like a large cumulus cloud frozen over. They disembark to walk the few meters to the beacon; Hyunwoo leads them up the ice cloud, K.E.N. bringing up the rear. Hyunwoo crests a ridge, spots something and signals the rest to walk down towards a dirty orange dot in the cloudscape.

They arrive at the large metal pod, weathered and damaged over the years, surrounded by various wire markers, all of it half buried in ice until K.E.N. digs out the hatch without asking. When Hyunwoo wrenches it open, a crack of cold light of the permanently dreary sky spreads into the cabin. They step through the airlock into a crypt-like space; the air inside is dry when they take off their helmets. Jinyoung comes upon a solitary cryo chamber and sweeps the ice from the nameplate. ‘Dr. Jung Taekwoon’ it reads.

K.E.N. fires up the cryo-chamber to start the reanimation procedure. The ice starts to melt along with warming the water inside and raising the occupant's body temperature to active levels. Hyunwoo cracks the lid, pushes it back, revealing a figure under a plastic shroud. He rips away the seal and Taekwoon’s eyes flicker open. He watches Hyunwoo, breathing, focusing, taking in his surroundings with wonder then reaches up with trembling hands and grabs onto Hyunwoo. He pulls himself up and places his cheek against Hyunwoo’s, and breaks into hacking sobs – first unashamedly like a little child, then like a man not knowing what to do with the grief entrenched into him. Decades’ worth of grief, of uncertainty engraved into his flesh and bones and nerves; in the hands that desperately caresses Hyunwoo’s face as he cries into Hyunwoo’s tight embrace.

∞

Taekwoon sits with a blanket over his shoulders, sipping from a steaming cup of rooibos. He looks up, marvelling at their faces, “Pray you never learn just how good it can be to see another face.” He takes another sip of his drink with a shaky hand. “I hadn’t much hope to begin with. After so much time, I had none. My supplies were exhausted. The last time I went to sleep, I set no waking date. You have literally raised me from the dead,” he laughs.

“These readings are from the surface?” Hyunwoo reviews Taekwoon’s piles of data.

“Over the years I’ve dropped various probes.”

“How far have you explored, Dr. Jung?” Jinyoung interrupts.

“I’ve mounted several major expeditions, but with oxygen in limited supply, Kipp there,” Taekwoon indicates a defunct robot, “Had to do most of the legwork.”

“What’s wrong with him?” K.E.N. asks

“Degeneration. It misidentified the first organics we found as ammonia crystals. We struggled on for a time, but ultimately, I decommissioned it and used its power source to keep the mission going. I shut it down before I went to sleep,” he says mournfully.

“Would you like me to look at him?”

“No. No, I think he needs a human touch.”

∞

Taekwoon leads the others up to the summit of a cloud. It’s desolate but undeniably beautiful. From the top, they watch the planet’s pale sun setting.

“The days are sixty-seven cold hours, the nights are sixty-seven far colder ones,” Taekwoon explains as they make their way back into the shelter. “The gravity is a very pleasant eighty percent of Mars’s. Up here, where I landed, the water is alkali and the air has too much ammonia in it to be breathable for more than a few minutes. But down at the surface, and there is a surface, the chlorine dissipates and the ammonia gives way to crystalline hydrocarbons and breathable air. To organics. Possibly even to life,” he smiles at them, Jinyoung especially, who has a faraway look in his face, “We may even be sharing this world.”

“We need to pick out a site. You don’t want to move the module once we land,” Hyunwoo says once they’re back inside the shelter.

“I’ll show you the probe sites.”

∞

Jinyoung glances around at the winds picking up, “Will conditions hold?”

“These squalls usually blow over. You’ve got a long-range transmitter?”

Jinyoung reaches up to check a box plugged in at his neck. He follows Taekwoon down to the edge of the ice. They peer down at an almost fifty-foot drop. Taekwoon steps off, dropping into the ridge. His elbow jets fire, slowing his descent in time for him to land with a thud. Jinyoung follows him, and they set out through a massive canyon of ice.

“Hyunwoo told me why you didn’t want to come,” Taekwoon says suddenly.

“If this excursion is about trying to change my mind about the futility of this mission...”

“I understand why you feel that way,” Taekwoon says as he turns and starts walking while Jinyoung follows, “I can promise you that the yearning to be with other people is extremely powerful. Our instincts, our emotions, are at the foundations of what makes us human. They’re not to be taken lightly.”

Jinyoung looks at him as the wind whips ice crystals between them.

∞

Back at the shelter, Hyunwoo watches the Lander touches down in a spray of ice. In Taekwoon’s pod Kihyun watches as K.E.N. crouches down beside Kipp and connects it to K.E.N.’s own power. The robot immediately boots up.

∞

In the ice canyon Taekwoon waits for Jinyoung to catch up as the wind picks up around them.

“You know why we couldn’t just send machines on these missions, Jinyoung? A trip into the unknown requires improvisation. Machines can’t improvise because you can’t program a fear of death. The survival instinct is our single greatest source of inspiration,” he pauses to take a breath, then turns to Jinyoung, “What does research tell us is the last thing we’ll see before we die?”

Jinyoung looks at him with a frown; it deepens as he tries to absorb what Taekwoon was suggesting.

“At the very moment of death, your mind pushes you a little harder to survive,” he turns and starts walking out onto a massive ice field.

Jinyoung, suspicious now, peers ahead to an opening in the ice. Taekwoon stops at the edge, looks around the wind-blasted ice plane. “When I left home, I felt fully prepared to die. But I just never fully accepted the possibility that my planet may not be the one.”

Jinyoung stands next to Taekwoon and peers over the edge at an enormous crevasse. “I’m sorry, I can’t let you stay.” Jinyoung hears him say as he starts at Taekwoon pulling his long-range transmitter from his neck.

Jinyoung looks at him incredulously, “What do you mean? Dr. Jung, we’re going to land all the biopods today.”

“Once the others realize what this place isn’t?”

Jinyoung’s mind races, he looks around. “You faked all the data?”

“I had a lot of time.”

“Is there even a surface?”

Taekwoon looks at him guiltily and sighs, then kicks Jinyoung over the edge.

But Jinyoung clings on.

“I tried to do my duty, Jinyoung, but the day I arrived I could see this place had nothing. I resisted the temptation for years but I knew there was a way to get rescued.”

“You fucking coward,” Jinyoung screams as he blasts Taekwoon off his feet with his jet and scrambles up onto the ice plane. Taekwoon tackles him and they go down wrestling – two tiny figures in a vast landscape, deciding the future of humanity with a brawl.

Taekwoon butts Jinyoung’s faceplate, he sees a tiny hairline crack then butts him again and again until it cracks with a sickening sound as the ammonia hisses inside.

Jinyoung rolls off from under him, desperately trying to plug the large crack with his palm.

Taekwoon crawls up to him, bends down to look at Jinyoung struggling, choking. “Please don’t judge me, Jinyoung. You were never tested like I was. Few men have been.”

Taekwoon stands up, watches Jinyoung’s silent thrashing and turns. As he walks away, he hears only the sounds of Jinyoung gasping and hacking through the comms and switches it off, as if it would not guilt him for leaving Jinyoung asphyxiating on the ice of this inconspicuous planet, away from his people.

As he watches Taekwoon leave, Jinyoung grabs his transmitter from the few steps away it had fallen into the ice. He tries to calm his frantic hands as he attempts to fit it back in. When he can’t reconnect it with his clumsy gloves, he pulls them off, hand exposed to the freezing biting wind until he gets the connector in.

Jooheon hears him first through the comms. “Hyung!!!! Hyung what happened?” Jinyoung hears him ask.

Jinyoung gasps at the absence of air. Over the comms he hears Hyunwoo saying “Don’t talk, breathe as little as possible. We’re coming.”

He suffocates on the ice; the dizziness begins as soon he takes off his helmet. Desperately Jinyoung tries to remember Jaebeom’s smile, before he loses consciousness. But the memory of the smile doesn’t come, nor does his whole life play behind his eyelids.

But he hears something; he hears the wind whispering it into his ears. He hears some say “Stay”, someone with Jaebeom’s voice. He knows then he’s dying. He laughs, he cries, teardrops freezing over before falling and Jinyoung finally surrenders himself to the wind.

∞

The Lander hurtles through the cloudscape, recklessly and dangerously fast, punching through some clouds, dodging others until it sweeps around a towering cumulus, spiralling in on the ice plain.

Jooheon spots him first and he and Hyunwoo run to Jinyoung lying prone on the ice.

“Dr. Jung. He was...” Jinyoung says taking in big gulps of air once Hyunwoo puts back his helmet and fixes the fissure.

“Dr. Jung did this?” Hyunwoo asks still unbelieving. When Jinyoung nods, he looks at Jooheon next to him. Hyunwoo keys his long-range transmitter and speaks into the comms, “Kihyun? Kihyun?”

∞

K.E.N. turns back from Kipp, “It needs a person to unlock its archival function.”

It makes way for Kihyun, who leans in to look at the data displayed across the screen. He goes to place his hand on it, but his attention is diverted by the radio on his hemlet squawking. As he reaches for his helmet, he places his hand on the screen and Kipp flickers back to life. Kihyun lifts his helmet to his ears, “Kihyun!!!” he hears Hyunwoo shout. At the same moment Kipp looks up at him, “Please, don’t make...” it doesn’t get to finish.

Taekwoon hears the explosion, sees a black cloud rising from up the hill from where his module was situated. Panic-stricken, he switches his comms back on. He hears Hyunwoo and Jooheon talking to Jinyoung, asking him to take slow breaths, that they’ll reach the shelter soon.

Taekwoon curses and runs for the Ranger.

In the cockpit of the Lander Jooheon pulls the helmet off Jinyoung, who looks at him.

“I’m sorry, Jinyoung. We should’ve followed your instincts.” Hyunwoo says. He speeds the Lander through the clouds, his urgency to get to Kihyun making him give up all caution.

The Lander flies through the black smoke from Taekwoon’s pod. Below, a figure bursts out of the smoke: K.E.N. Blackened, burned, but running towards the Lander, without Kihyun in sight.

Hyunwoo swings the Lander around and hits the airlock open as K.E.N. leaps up into it and the Lander thrusts away.

“Where’s Kihyun?”

“Kipp was set on self destruct mode. Dr. Jung made sure if anyone other than him touched it...” K.E.N. trails, enough empathy in his voice for a robot.

Hyunwoo’s hands shake on the yoke; he turns to look at Jinyoung then at Jooheon.

“Hyung please...” Jinyoung says as he grabs onto his wrist. He looks over at K.E.N., “Do you have a fix on the Ranger?”

“He’s pushing into orbit.”

“If he takes control of the ship, we’re dead,” Jinyoung says.

“He’d maroon us?” Jooheon asks, not believing his own words.

“He is marooning us,” Hyunwoo corrects him.

As the Ranger rockets upwards in front of them, Jinyoung moves up next to K.E.N., hits the transmitter, “Dr. Jung? Dr. Jung, please respond...”

“He doesn’t know the Arjuna’s docking procedure,” Jooheon says, concerned.

Hyunwoo turns to look at him, “The autopilot does.”

“Not since I disabled it,” K.E.N. tells them.

∞

Taekwoon hears Jinyoung over the comms, “Dr. Jung, if you attempt docking...” He ignores him, switches off the transmitter, looking instead at the navigation screen. When the Ranger approaches the Arjuna, Taekwoon pilots the Ranger alongside the ship and hits the autopilot.

“Auto-docking sequence withheld,” comes the voice of the AI.

Taekwoon looks at the screen, surprised. “Override,” he commands.

“Unauthorized,” it says again.

Taekwoon huffs, looks over at the manual docking controls. After skimming through it, he scrambles from the controls to the airlock, focused.

The Ranger inches closer to an outer hatch of Arjuna, a row of mechanical grapples try to connect it with the ship. Concentrating, Taekwoon keeps on manually working the docking system. The grapples pull the Ranger into the Arjuna’s hatch, until there is the clang of the ships coming together.

“Imperfect contact. Hatch lockout,” the AI warns.

“Override.”

“Hatch lockout disengaged.”

Taekwoon moves to the airlock control.

∞

Jinyoung stares out at the Ranger, “How is he locked on?”

“Imperfectly,” K.E.N. says

Knowing the repercussions of that, Jinyoung grabs the transmitter, “Dr. Jung! Dr. Jung! Do not, I repeat do not attempt to open the hatch! If you...”

∞

Taekwoon looks through the hatch window and hits the button opening the outer door. Outside, in the Arjuna’s docking port several grapples open and close blindly, trying to seal the join.

∞

Jooheon looks at Jinyoung, fear written clearly on his face, “What happens if he blows the hatch?”

“Nothing good.”

“Pull us back!” Hyunwoo immediately tells K.E.N. and it hits the retro-thrusters.

Knowing Taekwoon’s life was in danger and he was going to jeopardise all of them, in a last ditch effort Jinyoung tries to warn him against opening the Arjuna’s hatch. “K.E.N, relay my transmission to his on-board computer, and have it rebroadcast as an emergency message.”

∞

Taekwoon takes a breath, reaches for the inner lever when Jinyoung voice comes back again, “...peat, do not open inner hatch!” It startles Taekwoon and he hits the transmitter, “Hyunwoo, I don’t know what Jinyoung’s told you, but I’m taking control of the Arjuna, then we’ll talk about continuing the mission.” He turns back to the lever and pulls it.

A devastating rush of air yanks him into the airlock. As it depressurizes, there is a blast splitting the hatch apart. The escaping air and debris push Arjuna forward into a slow spin, pushing it out of its orbit.

Taekwoon is hammered by the debris as the airlock starts to rip apart. Arjuna spins faster and faster as the Ranger is pulled away; fragmenting and shredding the closest module of the ring.

From the cockpit of the Lander, the three of them stare in horror as their ship is sent spinning off its orbit towards the icy planet, pulled by the planet’s gravity.

Jooheon stares with his mouth hanging open until Hyunwoo grabs the yoke and hits the thrusters. He flies the Lander towards the crippled Arjuna; it is in a fast flat spin, heading down towards the stratosphere. Hyunwoo’s keeps his eyes glued to the Arjuna as he manoeuvres the Lander after it, dodging the Ranger’s debris.

“There’s no point using our fuel to...” K.E.N. says

“Just analyze the Arjuna’s spin,” Hyunwoo commands.

“What are you doing hyung?” Jinyoung asks.

The Lander rockets after Arjuna, closing slowly towards it, spinning dizzily as it plummets towards the atmosphere.

“Arjuna’s rotation is 67... 68 rpm,” K.E.N. says

“Get ready to match it with the retro-thrusters.”

“It’s not possible,” Jinyoung says.

“No. It’s necessary.”

As the spinning Arjuna begins to encounter the stratosphere, it starts heating up. Jooheon looks ahead at the spinning ship as Jinyoung and Hyunwoo try to man their craft.

“Arjuna is hitting stratosphere,” K.E.N. warns.

“There is no heat shield,” Jooheon says hopelessly as he looks on.

Hyunwoo checks the Lander’s speed against Arjuna, pulls back on thrust as they come below it.

The Lander comes perilously close to the red hot underside of their spinning ship. Hyunwoo banks it sideways, bringing its airlock within feet of the spinning Arjuna. He looks at the spinning hull, “K.E.N., you ready?”

“Ready.”

Hyunwoo watches the spinning hull, suddenly uncertain.

“This is no time for caution,” K.E.N. says.

Hyunwoo grins, “If I black out, take the stick. Jinyoung, get ready to engage the docking mechanism. Jooheonnie, hold tight.”

K.E.N. hits the retro-thrusters. The view starts to spin as the Lander goes into a faster and faster rotation, matching with the Arjuna, as both drop towards the planet. Inside the Lander, light flashes across their faces as the g-force of the spin pulls them against their restraints. They buffet against the atmosphere too and Jinyoung struggles to stay conscious, but he opens the airlock and watches the Arjuna’s hatch above him start to rotate slowly relative to him.

The glowing hot Arjuna and the Lander plummet, spinning towards the ice planet whose curvature is fast disappearing from their horizon. Jinyoung peers up at the hatch as the spin of the Lander matches up with the spin of the Arjuna. He waits as the buffeting moves the hatches. When they line up, he fires the grapples. They don’t connect.

Jinyoung watches the hatch, not the dizzying view, to prevent him from losing consciousness. He sees the hatches line back into alignment. He fires again. This time the grapples hold.

K.E.N fires the retro-thrusters, powerful enough to torque the mass of the Arjuna. The two crafts, now joined, start to spin more slowly. Hyunwoo eases back into his seat as the g-force lessens. The primary thrusters on the Lander raise the velocity of the whole ship and start to drag the Arjuna up and away from the planet’s gravity.

Only then does reality weigh in on Hyunwoo.

Kihyun is gone.

∞

“We have to complete the mission...” Jinyoung says.

Even in this uncertainty, his voice manages to come out resolute. Even when he knows they’ll probably have to compromise on a lot if they somehow even manage to make it to Prof. Goldstein’s planet. For one, it’ll have to be his hyung’s hopelessness. If you ask him, he’ll pick the egotist over the defeated man any day.

“We literally cannot hyung,” Jooheon says, his voice is still heavy from crying.

This poor boy, Jinyoung doesn’t even want to consider what must be going through him, though he wonders what metal Jooheon is made of to still be optimistic and level-headed, even in his fear and his sorrow. Kihyun was after all his family.

“Hyung,” Jooheon calls him out of his reverie, “What are you thinking?”

“The beings who led us here...they communicate through gravity, right?”

Jooheon nods.

“Could they be talking to us from the future?”

“Maybe,” Jooheon frowns, “You’d know more about this than me hyung...”

He hears the whine in Jooheon’s voice, understands that he’s not proficient in this subject as, say, Jaebeom. But Jaebeom isn’t here with him, and he just has to speak aloud his ideas to see them take physical form in front of eyes. Jaebeom had always laughed at that, at his incapability to hold in his thoughts once he was properly exhilarated.

“Well,” he looks at Jooheon, “If they can...”

“They? They are creatures of at least five dimensions, hyung,” and Jooheon continues in exasperation, “To them time may be just another physical dimension. To them the past might be a canyon they can drop into and the future a mountain they can climb up...but to us...”

“Time is relative; it can stretch and squeeze...”

“But it can’t run backwards, hyung. Not for us.”

“The only thing that can move across dimensions like time is gravity,” Jinyoung says as he looks up to gaze at Rudra.

It is an older, spinning black hole – what his professors liked to call a gentle singularity. He hated that term; they are hardly gentle, though their tidal gravity was quick enough that something crossing the horizon fast was allowed to survive ... a probe, say. Perhaps even a man inside a shuttle.

Jinyoung shakes his head, beyond the horizon was a complete mystery, the gravitational pull so extreme that nothing, not even light itself could escape the singularity’s clutches.

“We need more data. We need to see inside a black hole.”

“And the laws of nature prohibit a naked singularity.”

He knows Jooheon is right. The black hole itself is a singularity, a point of infinite density. But no one can see the singularity itself; it’s always hidden in a shroud of darkness behind its horizon.

“If we could look beyond the event horizon...”

“Hyung, some things aren’t meant to be known.”

“For years Prof. Daggubati has tried to solve gravity without changing the underlying assumptions about time,” Jinyoung continues.

“And?”

“And that means each iteration becomes an attempt to prove its own proof; it’s recursive. Nonsensical.”

“Are you calling Prof. Daggubati’s life’s work ‘nonsense’, hyung?”

“No, I’m saying he has been trying to finish it with one arm, no, with both arms tied behind his back.”

Jooheon looks at him in understanding. “There was never a Plan A, was there?”

Jinyoung’s answer is cut off by K.E.N. suddenly speaking into the comms. “Jooheon, Jinyoung, I want you to come to the airlock immediately,” it commands.

Having never heard K.E.N. use that tone with them, they hurry through the hallways to the airlock. They’re not prepared for what they see. Hyunwoo is sitting on the floor in the space between the outer hatch and the airlock, and he doesn’t have his suit on.

When Jinyoung tries the open the door the AI denies him entry. Hyunwoo has locked himself in there, and he is crying. He looks unstable too.

“Hyung...” Jinyoung calls him through the comms.

“Misery loves company,” Hyunwoo says, smiling through his tears.

“Hyung, can you open the door?”

“We should’ve never asked you to come along with us when you didn’t want to. You jinxed the mission Jinyoung.”

Jinyoung gulps, his heart palpitating fast at an inkling of what Hyunwoo might do. “Yeah, I did. Now can you open the door please?”

Hyunwoo doesn’t answer.

Jooheon cries, watching silently between Jinyoung and his Hyunwoo-hyung – the man who is what remains of his family.

“Hyung...” Jooheon says.

“What do I do now, Jooheonnie?” Hyunwoo asks with a whimper, “Kihyun is gone.”

“Hyung please...” Jooheon says as his voice breaks with his sobs.

“Jinyoung,” Hyunwoo says, “What do I do?”

“Hyung,” Jinyoung calls him again, remembering asking the same thing to his hyung, “We have a mission to complete. You’re our leader, you have to help us.”

“Whatever for?” Hyunwoo looks up at them, looks at Jinyoung when he speaks again, “What else is there left? What do I live for Jinyoung?”

Jinyoung sees a sceptre of himself in Hyunwoo then. He looks lifeless, hopeless, almost in the brink of his sanity; he looks like he has given up.

Grief, when it comes to you, comes differently and never twice in the same way. It doesn’t ask for your permission, doesn’t wait for the opportune moment and it certainly doesn’t care how you process it. The fates say “here, take it, it’s yours now, do what you will with it” and you do because cannot say no.

You process it in different ways too; never knowing what to do with it, never able to take its burden no matter how broad your shoulders. There’s no way to measure it either, it’s never too big or too small; it’s just is, it exists as a truth for you, that you have to live through. Or choose not to.

It had taken time, but Jinyoung had forced himself to live again. He wonders if he can convince Hyunwoo of the same.

“You live for what Kihyun-hyung spent his whole life on. He wouldn’t want to you to...”

Hyunwoo scoffs, not letting Jinyoung finish. “Now I know what you have felt all these years. Why you left the university, why you don’t like the professors...it’s the patronising right?”

When Jinyoung doesn’t answer, he continues, “You know this feeling Jinyoung. So tell me,” he looks up at him, “Tell me what is the point of living anymore?”

Jinyoung didn’t even have to open those sutures and force his thumb in, Hyunwoo did it for him. The pain blooms back up, spreads onto his skin and he has that same sense of weight on him; he feels like he’s drowning, fat tears rolling from his eyes involuntarily.

Hyunwoo smiles at him.

Jinyoung turns to Jooheon when he whispers, “What happens if hyung blows the airlock?”

“We lose critical mass.”

They look back at Hyunwoo again, he still smiling, as if knowing the two of them have figured it out. There is regret in his face; defeated of every single purpose of his life. He looks lost; he has lost everything. How do you convince a man like that to go on? What do you tell him to live for anymore? That Jinyoung knows and he fears for him and fears what he’s about to do. 

“Go suit up, go, go, go,” he yells at Jooheon, “K.E.N. close the walkway door after you.”

They’re running to the cockpit when they hear the blast. They get thrown into the wall of the hallway. Jinyoung’s head throbs from the impact when he lifts himself back up. Somehow they make it to the cockpit of Arjuna.

“We’re heading into Rudra’s pull,” Jooheon says.

Jinyoung scrambles to where Jooheon is checking his equipment. “The navigation mainframe is destroyed and we don’t have enough life support to make it back to Mars, if Prof. Goldstein’s planet is a bust. But we might just scrape to her planet.”

“What about fuel?”

“Not enough. But I’ve got a plan.”

Jooheon doesn’t like where this is going. He knows for a fact Jinyoung doesn’t even know enough about flying the Arjuna. His knowledge of physics will just not cut it.

“We have to let Rudra suck us right to his horizon, then do a powered slingshot around to launch us at Goldstein’s.”

“Manually?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“That doesn’t comfort me one bit.”

“What do we have to lose anyway? This has turned into a suicide mission, was one from the beginning,” he laughs uncharacteristically, like a maniac, “I’ll take us just inside the critical orbit.”

And for the first time Jooheon is scared. “And the time slippage?”

“Neither of us can afford to worry about relativity,” Jinyoung’s smile fades, “All we have now is time.”

He unbuckles and makes Jooheon take care of the ring module as he suits up and goes out with K.E.N. to arrange and lock down different bulkheads, while Jooheon checks their population bomb and secures it in the cockpit with a stronger power source.

“K.E.N. will have to jump into Rudra,” Jinyoung says when he gets back into the cockpit.

“What?” Jooheon says, shocked.

“K.E.N. has the old optical transmitter from Kipp with him, I’ve already told him what to look for.”

“You’d do this for us?” Jooheon says looking at K.E.N.

“Before you get teary, try to remember that as a robot, I have to do anything you say, anyway.”

It’s the first time in a long time that they actually laugh, it feels wrong to laugh, but the hysteria catches up to them now when they had to do what could probably be considered impossible. When he doesn’t stop laughing, Jinyoung puts his palm on his Jooheon’s forehead and at last he comes to a stop.

He’s seen it multiple times by now, the watch that Jaebeom had given him before leaving. What Jinyoung had thought had run out of cells, so he had stashed it with his other knick-knacks on the book-shelf.

But he had never bothered to look. That the second hand moving, what he had thought, between two smaller divisions, was instead oscillating between a division and the null space between two.

Thick and thin lines, ones and zeroes, dashes and dots.

Someone was sending him a message through space-time.

“The only thing that can travel through time is gravity,” that’s what Jaebeom had told him once.

Gravity, you see, is, the warping of space and time. Gravity is the curvature of the universe, forced into shape by massive bodies, the curvature that determines the path that objects will travel. That curvature is dynamical, moving as those objects move. So, if Jinyoung was a beam of light then Jaebeom was that beautiful inexplicable distortion in space-time, curving the fabric of the universe around Jinyoung, such an immense pull of that felling which laid in that singular space inside his form, such an immense pull that Jinyoung couldn’t but fall through the precipice into him.

“There is another thing that can travel through time, hyungie,” Jinyoung had corrected him then, smug smile like a medal worn on his face; “It’s love.”

Now, he feels that pull on his wrist from the other side. He looks. And there it is.

That red string he had thought snapped forever, had thought all that remained was the little strands of a love unfulfilled, flying, searching for its other halves, wasn’t torn at all. When he looks up, he finds himself in the base of the great world tree and far off he sees them, smiling between themselves, smug in the knowledge of the length of his thread. They’re quietly spinning in their loom at Yggdrasil. The Norns, those unkind women, or whom he had thought unkind, had always known. When Urðr had spinned that which had happened, and Verðandi allotted that which was happening, Skuld had had been waiting with her string of the inevitable, of that which should become. That string had always remained. Only Jinyoung had been too blind to see it. 

The watch – Jaebeom’s watch, the watch he had given to Jinyoung, the one he had promised to come back for has been relaying a message all this long, from the future to his past. Two years since Jaebeom had left. The two years it took to reach Saturn and pass through the wormhole and then fly where Jaebeom was required to fly into.

He looks up at Rudra and smiles a smile of relief. He smiles, bright in the face of that emptiness; eyes crinkling, wrinkles forming on the tops of his cheeks that Jaebeom had loved to trace with his fingers.

He knows now what he has to do.

∞

When he was five or so, Jaebeom had read about Odin – the mythological King of the Aesirs, an old god of an equally godly tribe. The hero-worship had come instantly to Jaebeom; a man with wolves and ravens as minions, who suspended himself upside-down for days on the cosmological tree, all in pursuit of knowledge and the wisdom so fiercely guarded by the fates, how could little Jaebeom not revere him. And all it did was instil a proud sense of duty, a greed for knowledge so persistent, that all Jaebeom had wanted, all his life, was in some way to emulate his hero, to be able to be in a place to help, even if it meant him foregoing the threat to his wellbeing.

When he is speeding down the iridescent inky blackness inside of Rudra, the only thought that comes to him , the one after that Jinyoung would’ve loved to see it, is that he got his wish granted for his swansong, and in that moment he wants to slap himself. Although he doesn’t, because the view in front of him is breathtaking.

From the distance Rudra had looked surprisingly benign. The spherical inside however, is what Jaebeom would describe as a star turned inside-out. When he plunged into Rudra, he had expected to see black, but he plunged into a shimmering cavalcade of all wavelengths: light, sound, everything.

He and his robot, Cin, hurtle through the Bifrost of light when a black dot appears rushing towards them. It turns out to be a dark sphere. They plunge through it into the silent darkness until they find themselves falling into a glassy sphere, of what could only be a four-dimensional rabbit hole with blinding rapidity. Jaebeom hangs on for dear life at the turbulent frequency of the light and darkness of everything around him but he finds himself no farther from the singularity.

The mass of the black hole determines how long it takes to reach the singularity. Could be a blink of an eye, could be a handful of heartbeats. Jaebeom doesn’t know how this god looked in his heyday. But hit the singularity he must; he doesn’t get a choice. Beyond the event horizon, nothing can stay still; you are forever compelled to move towards the singularity. Turn left, turn right, turn up, turn around, it doesn't matter, the singularity lies in all Jaebeom’s possible futures.

Suddenly Jaebeom and his robot are launched out of his Garuda. He sees it explode as he’s dragged to one side, missing a white sphere, plunging instead towards a smaller glass-like sphere.

Cin is pulled away from him as Jaebeom slowly falls towards this glassy sphere, reminiscent of the wormhole, but the light within is not stars but an infinity of what he assumes are world lines – paths of objects through space-time, the huge gravitational differences stretching them to engulf most of his vision.

He watches in wonder at the ordered chaos of these world lines as he falls through his single one; it stretches behind him, the infinite futures of his world line splitting ahead too, to all the different possibilities in space-time.

As he drops, his past and future world lines break up so they become like infinite reflections in parallel mirrors, somehow the lines criss-crossing into a small square tunnel – a Tesseract.

Jaebeom desperately reaches out, knocking the sides of the tunnel, trying to slow his descent. He grapples onto the walls, punching what looks like bricks out of them until he finally stops, hanging by his hand. Strangely he feels buoyant; when he lets go, he finds he’s floating. He settles on looking around in the sudden calm, finally catching his breath. He reaches out to the tunnel wall and is confused when he sees each ‘brick’ is actually tightly packed acrylic pages. Holobooks, he realizes. Holobooks; as seen from behind a shelf.

Jaebeom pushes against a holobook, it doesn’t budge. He pushes harder again until it moves slightly. Frustrated, he settles on punching the holobook again and again. Finally it drops out of sight, revealing Jinyoung, aged seventeen, side swept hair, impeccably dressed for his age who turns, startled by the book falling from the shelf of their library.

Jaebeom is shocked at first, the sight catching him unawares. Unconsciously he starts screaming for Jinyoung, voice pitching louder and louder, but he doesn’t hear Jaebeom.

He watches Jinyoung bend down to pick the holobook up and then the strangest thing happens; he sees another version of him, who picks the holobook up and smiles his best smile at Jinyoung.

It is not another version of him; it is him – a Jaebeom from the past. He’ll forget a lot, but Jaebeom will never forget the day he had met Jinyoung. Though it is almost a decade in the past, he remembers like it was yesterday and now that past has become his present, happening right in front of his eyes.

He is not convinced at what he sees, needing to confirm something. He floats to another part of the wall lined with more holobooks. It is their study, in their home within the willows. There is only a single missing book, and through that gap he sees himself give Jinyoung his watch, he sees Jinyoung cry, sees himself give Jinyoung one last kiss, sees himself walk out.

Jaebeom screams at himself, screams at him not to leave, calls himself an idiot as he cries and in his frustration, punches out the books near him with all his strength. A few fall and he sees Jinyoung turn to look the shelf. He sees Jinyoung look straight at him, but as if seeing through him. But that fascination had lasted only the few moments Jinyoung hadn’t cried.

He’s watching Jinyoung cry, watching him run his thumb over the glass of his watch when he hears someone call his name.

“Jaebeom?” It’s the dismembered voice of Cin.

Startled, Jaebeom turns. “You survived,” he says in shock, but his robot is not there.

“Somewhere. In their fifth dimension,” Cin says over the comms, “They saved us.”

“Who’s ‘they’? And why would they help us?” he says in frustration.

“I don’t know, but they constructed this three-dimensional space inside their five-dimensional reality to allow you to understand it.”

“It isn’t working.” Jaebeom scoffs.

“Yes, it is. You’ve seen that time is represented here as a physical dimension. You even worked out that you can exert a force across space-time.”

“Gravity,” Jaebeom, realizes.

He looks around the infinite tunnel of infinite possibilities. “Gravity crosses all the dimensions, including time,” Jaebeom says, “Inside the singularity, the common-sense understanding that the only way you move is move forward, breaks down.” He pulls himself up to a different wall and starts counting the books. “Cin, do you have the quantum data?”

“I’m transmitting it on all wavelengths but nothing’s getting out.”

“I can do it.”

“Jaebeom, they didn’t bring us here to change the past.”

“No, we brought ourselves here,” Jaebeom says as he floats to another iteration of his past.

This wall of books though, punches the air out of his lungs. He sees Jinyoung sitting on his bed; he’s dressed up and silently crying. In his hand is the watch Jaebeom had given him. Jinyoung rubs the glass of the case and sighs before pocketing it.

Jinyoung looks older, he is older. Jaebeom wonders how much time has passed. How long has he been caged up here in the tesseract; to him it has merely been two years and a bit.

He sees Yugyeom come in and tell Jinyoung, Hyunwoo-hyung was there to pick him up. Jaebeom frowns, wondering what had happened until his fear answers it for him. He remembers the plan, the second mission, of sending in others after them to terraform the planet they had found habitable. He remembers his one final condition to Prof. Daggubati, that never to involve Jinyoung in any of this. To let Jinyoung live his life the way he wanted.

Seems like his professor hadn’t kept his word, because he sees Jinyoung wipe his tears with the sleeve of his jacket and get up to leave.

Jaebeom cannot let that happen. If Jinyoung leaves...Jaebeom doesn’t even want to consider the ramifications of that. They will truly be tugged away from each other through time and space. At least, stuck here in his prison, he could still see his Jinyoung at whatever moment of his life in their home.

But Jinyoung is walking away. Furious and frustrated, he tries the only thing possible. He counts the books in a row, remembers his Morse, and punches out the books with all his will.

Four letters, one word.

Jaebeom holds onto his breath as he sees Jinyoung turn at the sound, sees him count the spaces. But then Jinyoung casts his eyes on the floor; his face hardens and he walks out.

Jaebeom breathes harder, looks around the Tesseract not knowing what else was there to do. He has lost, he has lost Jinyoung.

“Jaebeom, are you still there?” Cin says through the comms.

“Jinyoung.....Jinyoung was recruited for the terraforming mission,” Jaebeom sobs, “I couldn’t save him.”

“You still can.”

Jaebeom has an epiphany. He pushes off that wall of books, and floats to another one. He looks through the gap in the books that is still there from where he had punched them out when he had seen himself leave for his mission.

Jinyoung’s bedroom is full of particulates floating in the air from the dust storm. He tries to get a closer look and sees a window open. It wasn’t like Jinyoung to be irresponsible. Jinyoung hadn’t bothered putting the fallen books in place either.

Jaebeom has an inkling, and it is a strong one borne out of the instinct of knowing his other half so well, that maybe Jinyoung can feel his presence – him – through time and space. Frowning Jaebeom says, “Cin, feed me the coordinates of Prof. Goldstein’s planet.”

“How will that help?”

“He’ll know which planet to pick; he’ll work it out and tell the others not to try the other ones.”

Jaebeom uses gravity to exert a force on the dust particles, manipulating this much smaller weight, controlling the gravity above and below it to pour it into a shape of a circular bargraph. It is then Jinyoung burst into the room, Yugyeom coming in past him and slamming the window shut.

Jaebeom sees Jinyoung stop and stare at the dust on the floor, sees him come sit down near it, watches him spend the entire night to decode it. Jaebeom turns to look at the floor where he had left the message for Jinyoung, “Don’t you see, Cin? I brought myself here. We’re here to communicate with the three-dimensional world. We’re the bridge.”

Jaebeom moves to another iteration of Jinyoung’s room. “‘They’ have access to infinite time, infinite space,” Jaebeom gestures at the infinities spreading out in all directions, “But no way to find what they need. But I can find Jinyoung and find a way to tell him. Like I found all these moments.”

“How?” Cin says over the comms.

“Love,” Jaebeom smiles and remembers his watch that Jinyoung pocketed.

“So how do we pass on the quantum data?

“The watch. He has it with him.”

Jaebeom flies to another iteration, it’s in the past, few years after he had left. He sees the watch lying on top of Jinyoung’s bedside drawer. Confident of his own confidence he explains his plan to Cin through the comms, “We use the second hand to send it. Translate the data into Morse and feed it to me. Jinyoung will translate the data and somehow they’ll be able to use it, even if they can’t send it to the professors.”

“Jinyoung is in space. What if he takes it out and leaves it somewhere and forgets about it?”

“He won’t.”

“But how do you know?”

“Because I gave it to him.”

There is a pause from his robot before he hears Cin in the comms. It starts to transmit the data and Jaebeom grabs the second-hand worldline to manipulate it, sending waves down the space-time.

∞

As the crippled Arjuna slowly falls towards the heart of darkness among the stars, the Lander detaches, shifting its orientation.

“Once we’ve gathered enough speed around Rudra, we use the Lander 1 and Ranger 2 as rocket-boosters to push us out of the black hole’s gravity,” Jinyoung says over the comms. The Lander reattaches to the rear of the ring module. Jinyoung slides into Ranger 2, checking the systems, “The linkages between Landers are destroyed.”

K.E.N. sits at the controls, running similar checks.

“So we’ll have to control manually?” Jooheon asks.

“When Lander 1 is spent, K.E.N. will detach.”

“I don’t want to let K.E.N. go.”

“We have to shed mass if we are to escape that gravity.”

“Kaṇād’s third law,” K.E.N. says over the comms, “The only way humans have ever figured out of getting somewhere is to leave something behind.”

The black hole’s gravity makes the ship shudder. Jooheon, helmet on, tightens his harness. The Arjuna streaks above the glowing horizon, skirting the blackness beneath. The ship orbits the black hole with blinding acceleration, shaking with gravitational energy.

“Maximum velocity achieved,” K.E.N. says, checking his instruments in Lander, “Prepare to fire escape thrusters.”

In the cockpit of Ranger 2, Jinyoung checks his instruments. “Ready.”

In the ring module of Arjuna, Jooheon looks out at the glowing horizon, glancing fearfully at the darkness below.

“Jooheonnie, don’t let anything happen to the watch,” Jinyoung says through the comms.

“I’ll keep it safe until you’re back, hyung. Don’t worry.” Jooheon says looking at the watch around his wrist, constantly relaying the quantum data. He doesn’t know much about particle physics, just the odds and ends. That’s why he wonders why Jinyoung had given it to him for safekeeping, this gift from the other ‘beings’. He doesn’t question, the weight of the watch makes him feel courageous, makes him feel brave; gives him hope to do better.

“Main engine ignition in three, two, one, mark.” Jooheon hits the button and the main engines fire, the ship pulling forward against Rudra. Jooheon feels the thrusters strain to lift the craft. “Lander 1 engines, on my mark. Three, two, one, mark.”

“Fire,” K.E.N. says. Lander 1’s engines fire, adding to the thrust. The Arjuna starts rising away from the darkness.

“Ranger 2’s engines, on my mark. Three, two, one, mark,” Jooheon says.

Jinyoung hits the button. “Fire.”

Ranger 2’s engines add a fresh blast of fire, pushing the Arjuna higher and higher, back into the starlight. Jinyoung, shaking with the thrust, looks at his instruments and laughs, “That little manoeuvre cost us fifty-one years.”

∞

“Did it work?” Jaebeom asks once he’s done.

“I think it might have.”

“How can you tell?” Jaebeom asks hopefully.

“Because the bulk beings are closing the Tesseract.”

Jaebeom looks out to the distance; the darkness is rapidly approaching, world lines becoming world sheets, becoming bulks.

Gravity is like Gāṇḍīva, Jaebeom thinks; that famed sword of the gods, worshiped by the celestials, incapable of being damaged or broken; a lot like love. And like Gāṇḍīva, when Agní came and asked Arjuna to return it to Varuṇa, for it belonged to him, his future now asks him to return gravity – his love – back to the heavens, for they had now served their purpose.

“Don’t you get it yet, Cin? ‘They’ aren’t ‘beings’. They’re us, trying to help. Just like I tried to help Jinyoung.”

“People didn’t build this Tesseract, Jaebeom.”

“Not yet, but one day. Not you and me but people, people who’ve evolved beyond the four dimensions as we know them,” Jaebeom says and he braces himself as the tesseract closes in on him.

Jaebeom’s last memory is of passing through the glassy bulk of the wormhole. He sees a ship there; it must be the Arjuna. It must be carrying Jinyoung inside it. When he looks in from the bulk, he comes face-to-face with his other half.

Jinyoung looks at Jaebeom with fear which then turns to wonder when Jaebeom reaches for him. Their hands would have touched if they weren’t in different dimensions; instead Jinyoung’s fingers distort the space of Jaebeom’s fingers. He only gets to touch him for those few moments, until he is snagged away from Jinyoung.

He had wondered if love survived time, stretched thin, pulled apart but still existing. If his love could survive time. One moving faster than the other, existing parallelly and yet not. Transcending their idea of time and space.

Now he knows it does. Even in death it exists, like a relic of something beautiful. Metamorphoses even, to something terribly colossal and stunning. Much like a blackhole. An entity of unknown birth, yet born perhaps within seconds. Existing, perhaps since even before the galaxies existed, in whatever reality.

He thinks he’s maudlin in his last few moments but how is that condensate in any way inferior? Who defined the age of the universe as per the largest number they could imagine: 4000. 

You cannot put a measure to an entity that exists beyond space-time.

∞

Seated in the ring module of Arjuna, Jooheon holds on tight to his seat as if he were sat on a rollercoaster and not pushing away from the most dangerous thing in the universe; though in his fear he still finds a sense of safety in Jinyoung’s confidence. “Like you said hyung, the only thing we have is time.” He hears Jinyoung’s laughter through the comms. It makes him smile too. “You don’t sound so bad for someone for a hundred and six.”

Lander 1’s engines die out. “Lander 1, preparing to detach,” K.E.N. says, “On my mark. Three...”

From the Arjuna, Jooheon looks over at the Lander. He hears K.E.N. complete the countdown, hears it hit a switch. The warning comes onto his screen.

“Detach,” K.E.N. says.

Jooheon sees Lander 1 drop, revealing Jinyoung in Ranger 2. “Goodbye, K.E.N.”

“See you on the other side, Jinyoung,” K.E.N. says through the comms. as Lander 1 falls behind towards Rudra, and the Arjuna continues to rise.

Something in that makes Jooheon frown. Puzzled he looks at Jinyoung inside Ranger 2.

Inside Ranger 2 Jinyoung checks his dwindling fuel supply. “Hey, Jooheonnie, nice reckless flying.”

When Ranger 2’s engines die out, Jooheon registers the burnout on his console.

“Ranger 2, prepare to detach,” Jinyoung says, “On my mark...”

Jooheon looks up, shocked. “No! Hyung...” He unbuckles and flies to the window looking at Jinyoung. “What are you doing! Hyung what the fuck are you doing!!!” he says desperately, crying now.

Jinyoung looks across at Jooheon and smiles, and suddenly he’s back to that moment, when he was on one side and Yugyeom on the other and all that connected them was the double helix from their parents and nothing much, no familiarity, no love. Jinyoung accepts that now, he hadn’t allowed himself to love his little brother as he should’ve been loved. Somehow in the flow of things, he had been too intertwined in his love for his Jaebeom and even when he went away, he hadn’t been able to give it up, give it away. Somehow obsessively clutching onto it and hiding it into the crevices of his heart. There was no one else he had wanted to care about, such was his selfishness.

He wants to be regretful that the fates have once again brought him to that same moment to show him the mirror. Here do you see, they tell him, do you deserve happiness when you haven’t done your duty to your own blood? But blood of the covenant is always thicker than the water of the womb, and he’s happy, quite strangely, shamefully happy that even now when he too has lost everything dear to him, he still has his yearning. Somehow knowing there’s a person waiting for him on the other side. He hopes they are, and even if they weren’t at least he can rest knowing they we’re alive somewhere in another continuum and they had Jinyoung in their memories, still loving him just the same, just as they had promised. He deserves that love; he’ll fight the gods for it.

“Third law of Kaṇād. You have to leave something behind,” Jinyoung holds his hand out in farewell to Jooheon, “Detach.”

As Ranger 2 drops away from the Arjuna, Jinyoung sees their ship accelerate away to a bright point as he falls and falls. He hears Jooheon crying as he monitors Jinyoung’s lonely transmissions. 

There was no other way, Jinyoung reasons. He cannot convince, impress with words of wisdom, nor his noble conduct to the gods to give his other half back to him. Neither can he rage and wreak havoc across the universe, threaten to destroy it. He’s merely a man who loved another more than anyone could fathom, would never love any other again. “What is the point” he remembers Hyunwoo’s words. In the end they were more alike than he had thought.

He waits for fear to strike him, but it doesn’t come. Jinyoung is not afraid; he feels like he’s on a boat, winding down the river of life, and soon his people will strike a fiery arrow onto him, hoping to release him from the cycle of births.

When his Ranger twists and turns to fall head-first into Rudra, does he come face to face with this terrible god. All that longing, all that suffering, all that searching has brought him to this, to look into the eyes of this old god and tell him to free him of this bondage at last.

He wants to untie that string, now that he knows it isn’t snapped at all, that even if he did take it off, it’d still be preserved, intact, to wrap around another twin souls. After all the matter that falls into a black hole adds to the mass of it, its gravity doesn't disappear from the universe.

“There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself” Jinyoung remembers reading it somewhere as he falls further. He feels all his expectations, all his pride, all his fears fall away; he feels free, at last. He’s naked, leaving only that which is truly important – the path of his heart. So, when the time at last comes, he stares death in his face and smiles as he plunges into the great maw of this silent awaiting god.

Jinyoung starts to breathe faster, shudders with the exponentially rising gravitational energy as he crosses the horizon, plunging towards the singularity. There are infinite images of each star, light rays that circle the black hole several times before converging towards him. That’s when Jinyoung remembers his soulmate’s smile.

Jaebeom smiles with more than his mouth; his happiness spreads into his eyes, his words get gentler, uttered through a voice that is softer. His happiness rises to the surface and reaches for those dark places inside Jinyoung where even the sun cannot. Jinyoung didn’t want this smile to tighten his chest in memory but curiously he doesn’t find any regret in him.

Jinyoung closes his eyes in that comfort, prepares for his life to play behind his eyes as all wavelengths of light cocoon him, cascade with him; the lights and sounds a lullaby as he finally falls to sleep, hoping to wake to his soulmate’s face on the other side.

∞

A man is perusing through the kiosks of produce – fresh vegetables and fruits displayed proudly by whom must be the farmers, who are prostrating to the man in deference. The man must be important.

It looks like a market, though not like one Jinyoung has ever seen. The man stops at one of the stalls, apparently taken with the perfectly ripened, deliciously glossy, vibrantly red apples. When Jinyoung looks clearly, he finds the man is wearing a weird robe – long with wide sleeves, the robe long enough to hide most of his trousers. The shoes are weird too.

His hair is tied into a top knot high on his head and held in place with a pin. There’s a piece of cloth going around his forehead too, covering his hairline. He looks like royalty; that much he gathers from his finery. No, he’s certain.

The man is bargaining the price now, and his voice is melodious, though it has a depth to it. It looks like he’s only doing it for fun, because he’s laughing and the shopkeeper is laughing along with him. Jinyoung thinks that sound is familiar, almost as if he’s listening to himself. Confused, he looks back at the scene playing out before him.

Suddenly an apple drops to the ground; the man goes to pick it up but is beaten by someone else who picks it up for him.

This other man is handsome; he’s tall, has broad shoulders and fair skin for someone whose clothes aren’t as fine. They’re less flowy, less excessive and more restrictive. By the looks of it, he seems like someone in charge of protection. There is a sort of armour on him and what Jinyoung knows is a sword tied to the man’s belt.

He doesn’t say anything at first, only hands back the apple.

“감사하다, 대장,” the royalty says in what Jinyoung assumes is an archaic form of his own mother tongue.

“천만에요, 왕세손,” the handsome man says back and smiles and that’s when Jinyoung sees it.

Jinyoung knows those eyes – sharp and piercing, intimidating if not for that smile that comes naturally, that half shy-half suave tilt of lips. Jinyoung knows that smile too. That ‘beautiful’ cannot even encompass the gravity of it.

And he knows those moles – tiny, twin little stars just below Jaebeom’s left eyebrow.

He realizes he’s looking at Jaebeom. He’s looking at Jaebeom and himself.

∞

The pitter-patter of the gently falling rain is what rouses him; the rain and the weight of his husband sleeping on his chest. When he twists and turns, Jaebeom grumbles unintelligently and burrows in deeper. Even though Jinyoung smiles at his husband’s childishness, he’s still shaken from his dream.

Somehow he extricates himself from under Jaebeom and gets up. He stretches and yawns as he makes his way to the glass wall overlooking the meadow. There’s the unrelenting rain falling unconcerned as it always does, and it never forgets to bring with it the chilled gusts of soft winds. Jinyoung doesn’t complain though; water is the stuff of life. And he loves to cuddle up with Jaebeom whenever he can.

It is always raining in Vasundharā, their beautiful planet. When it doesn’t rain, it drizzles; incessantly too. Their sun only manages to greet them for a stretch of four months of their long, long year that ends in an equal stretch of the snow. From thawing to freezing it rains, the leaves grow, it rains, the leaves fall and it still rains.

He looks up at the sky. It is bruisingly overcast, layers upon layers of bulbous grey clouds; but somehow they still allow Víðarr and Váli – the twin day-moons – to peep through. Unlike the other two night-moons, they’re never apart.

Jinyoung remembers his dream vividly, even when it has been some time since he has woken up and has been busy with his musings. He understands it was a dream about the two of them, but what he doesn’t understand is why it hadn’t felt like a dream. It had felt like echoes of another life, perhaps long, long back in the past; a life that he has lived through.

But it is impossible. The myth he has grown up with tells him the Allfather and his brothers had crossed a gate from another universe where their tribe was dying, they had fought a terrible god together, the Allfather had lost his brothers in the war and in the end had taken refuge in Goldstone at last to create life so the universe could go on. 7848 years have passed since.

But his dream – his memory – wasn’t from that planet. It was from another place in another time where another Jinyoung and Jaebeom must have lived. After all, all universes grow from the same womb, manifest from the same matter, so they all follow parallel time cycles, manifesting and unmanifesting at the same time.

But does the love survive, Jinyoung wonders. Stretched thin like time, weighed down like gravity, become relative like time. How do you quantify it? What value do you put on it? You can see it, feel it; it's not abstract, but yet it has no unit. No measure, no way to measure.

Do you stretch you arms wide and say I love you this much? Say I love to the moons and back? Say it's as expansive as the universe? Exists even in our parallel lives? And yet not be even close enough to quantify it. That terrible, beautiful feeling in your chest that feels like a universe growing inside you.

Look up to the stars, gauge the distances by the speed of light and still the measure doesn't come close to the feeling you feel when you see that face.

He looks back at his Jaebeom; he’s sleeping with his mouth a little open and his fringe is falling onto his eyes. He looks like a big baby if you ask Jinyoung, who smiles and walks back to their bed to sit next to him. Jinyoung runs his fingers through Jaebeom’s fringe and pushes it back.

There it is – the twin moles. Jinyoung sighs a breath he had been holding onto unknowingly. This is his Jaebeom, he tells himself, his husband, and they are together; safe and sound and healthy. _“_ _If we wait and wait, the road to cross over will appear. Let’s just wait a bit longer.”_ That was what he had heard distinctly the handsome man say just when his dream was ending.

He smiles once and bends over to place a soft kiss on Jaebeom’s forehead. He caresses his husband’s cheeks and is hit with such a deep sense of longing it feels he’s being torn in two by a great force. He understands that this feeling was not born in him; it belongs to another Jinyoung from perhaps another universe – another reality. Perhaps existing in the past, or existing parallelly, or from the futures he has yet to live. A feeling of unknown birth, yet born perhaps within seconds of the universes coming into being, existing through the endless cycle of births and rebirths, and unable to be destroyed.

This longing is now his to bear forever.

Jinyoung sighs when he thinks if he’ll be tested too in this lifetime. But there exists this feeling that some other version of him has paid the dues to the fates so he can get to keep this love forever too. This love he can physically see in front of his eyes. This love, he’ll go to the edge of the universe for. This love, like his true north, he knows will always guide him back to where he belongs. That he’ll get to keep his Jaebeom.

Even if the waves of time were to take him away, Jinyoung knows, he’ll always find his way back home. Their fates twined together by that inevitability, sweetened by the knowledge that his love will always be waiting for him on the other side. Relieved, Jinyoung smiles through his tears, and whispering, so that he doesn’t wake Jaebeom, he promises, “I’ll always come home to you, hyung.”

∞


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Glossary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you don't understand the few of the names used in the fic.

In order of appearance:

**Amaterasu** : is the Japanese sun goddess, daughter of creator deities Izanagi and Izanami, and central to the Shinto religion.

**Tsukuyomi** : or Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto , is the moon god in Shinto pantheon and brother to Amaterasu.

**Oculus** : a made up hologram projector

**Vrs. :** a car specific AI.

**Brahmos** : It is the fastest supersonic cruise missile in the world. It is a joint venture between the Russian Federation's NPO Mashinostroyeniya and India's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), who together have formed **BrahMos** Aerospace. The name is a combination of the two rivers Brahmaputra in India and Moskva in Russia. Brahmaputra is son of lord Brahma, the creator god in Hinduism. The name BrahMos seemed fitting for a space research university.

**Surtr:** In Norse mythology, is a jötunn, foretold as being a major figure during the events of Ragnarök, including that he is stationed guarding the frontier of the fiery realm Múspell carrying his bright flaming sword, that he will lead "Múspell's sons" to Ragnarök, and that he will defeat Freyr.

**Pandora** : was the first human woman created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus in Greek mythology. According to her myth, Pandora opened a jar ( _pithos_ ) (commonly referred to as "Pandora's box") releasing all the evils of humanity.

**Atharva** : it is the fourth Veda, the revered books of Hinduism. ‘ _Atharvan_ ‘ originally comes from ‘priest’ and the book majorly deals with construction, Trade and commerce, and Statecraft. Things more mundane and from everyday life are described here instead of hymns for rituals like the other three Vedas.

**Alexie** : **or Alexey** **,** or **Aleksey** is a Russian and Bulgarian male first name deriving from the Greek _Aléxios_ (Αλέξιος), meaning "Defender" or “Defender of Mankind”, and thus of the same origin as the Latin Alexius.

**Ūrdhvapuṇḍra** : The **Urdhvapundra** is a tilak worn on the forehead by Vaishnavites to show that they are devotees of Vishnu. The general tilak pattern is of two or more vertical lines resembling the letter U, which commonly represent the feet of Vishnu and is always made with yellow or white ochre.

**Jörð** : _from_ Old Norse jǫrð, meaning "earth", is the personification of earth and a goddess in Norse mythology. She is the mother of the thunder god Thor, and a wife of Odin. Her name is often employed in skaldic poetry and kennings as a poetic term for land or earth. Here, her name is used for the university of agricultural sciences and astrobiology.

**Garuda** : In Hinduism, _Garuda_ is a divine eagle-like sun bird and the king of birds.

_**Ragnarök**_ _:_ is a series of events in Norse mythology, including a great battle, foretold to lead to the death of a number of great deities, natural disasters and the submersion of the world in water. After these events, the world will resurface anew and fertile, the surviving and returning gods will meet and the world will be repopulated by two human survivors.

**Yatsukamizuomizunu** : a Shinto primordial god.

**Arjuna** : is a hero and protagonist of the Indian epic _Mahabharata_ and also appears in other ancient Hindu mythological texts. In the epic he is described as one of the five sons of Pandu, collectively known as the Pandavas, and was born when his mother, Kunti, invoked the god Indra, the king of gods and the god of thunder, using a mantra on her husband's request. The family formed part of the royal line of the Kuru Kingdom.

**Swastika** : comes from Sanskrit, meaning 'conducive to well being'. It is one of the holiest and the most auspicious symbols in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and various other Eurasian cultures. In Hinduism, the right-facing _swastika_ , symbolizes _surya_ ('sun'), prosperity and good luck.

**Kartikeya** : also known as Skanda, Murugan and Subrahmanya, is the Hindu god of war. He is the son of Parvati and Shiva, brother of Ganesha.

**Hreiðarr** : is a male given name, from the Old Norse _hreiðr_ meaning “nest” or “home”, and _herr_ meaning “army”.

**Vasundharā** : or Dharaṇī is a chthonic goddess from Buddhist mythology of Theravada in Southeast Asia. She is comparable to the Earth goddesses Vasudhara bodhisattva in Mahayana and Vajrayana, and Bhoomi and Prithvi in Hinduism.

**Víðarr, Váli, Gríðr, Gersemi** : All children of Odin from different wives.

**Rudra** : is a Rigvedic deity associated with wind or storm, Vayu and the hunt. One translation of the name is 'the roarer'. In the Rigveda, Rudra is praised as the 'mightiest of the mighty'. Rudra is the personification of 'terror'. Depending upon the periodic situation, Rudra can mean 'the most severe roarer/howler' (could be a hurricane or tempest) or 'the most frightening one'. Rudra is identified with Shiva. In the Rigveda, Rudra's role as a frightening god is apparent in references to him as _ghora_ ('extremely terrifying'), or simply as _asau devam_ ('that god'). He is 'fierce like a formidable wild beast' (RV 2.33.11). Rudra is thus regarded with a kind of cringing fear, as a deity whose wrath is to be deprecated and whose favor curried.

**Śeṣanāga** : or Adishesha, is the King of all Nāgas and one of the primal beings of creation. In the Puranas, Shesha is said to hold all the planets of the universe on his hoods and to constantly sing the glories of the God Vishnu from all his mouths. He is sometimes referred to as Ananta Shesha, which translates as endless-Shesha or Adishesha "first Shesha". It is said that when Adishesa uncoils, time moves forward and creation takes place; when he coils back, the universe ceases to exist.

**Aśvinau** : The Aśvins, or Ashwini Kumaras ( _aśvin_ , plural _aśvinau_ ; meaning "horse possessors), are twin Vedic gods of medicine in Hinduism. Associated with the dawn, they are described as youthful divine twin horsemen in the _Rigveda_ , travelling in a chariot drawn by horses that are never weary. Here their name is used for the university of Space Biology and Medical Science.

**Norns** : in Norse mythology, are female beings who rule the destiny of gods and men. The origin of the name _norn_ is uncertain, it may derive from a word meaning "to twine" and which would refer to their twining the thread of fate. There are three of them. _Urðr_ meaning "fate", though both _Urðr_ and _Verðandi_ are derived from the Old Norse verb _verða_ , "to be". It is commonly asserted that while _Urðr_ derives from the past tense ("that which became or happened"), _Verðandi_ derives from the present tense of _verða_ ("that which is happening"). _Skuld_ is derived from the Old Norse verb _skulu_ , "need/ought to be/shall be"; its meaning is "that which should become, or that needs to occur". Due to this, it has often been inferred that the three norns are in some way connected with the past, present and future respectively, but it has been disputed that their names really imply a temporal distinction and it has been emphasised that the words do not in themselves denote chronological periods in Old Norse.

**Yggdrasil:** is an immense mythical ash tree that plays a central role in Norse cosmology, where it connects the Nine Worlds. It is center to the cosmos and considered very holy. The gods go to Yggdrasil daily to assemble at their things, traditional governing assemblies. The branches of Yggdrasil extend far into the heavens, and the tree is supported by three roots that extend far away into other locations; one to the well Urðarbrunnr in the heavens, one to the spring Hvergelmir, and another to the well Mímisbrunnr. Creatures live within Yggdrasil, including the dragon Níðhöggr, an unnamed eagle, and the stags Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr and Duraþrór, including the three Norns.

**Óðinn** : is a widely revered god in Germanic mythology. Norse mythology, the source of most surviving information about him, associates Odin with wisdom, healing, death, royalty, the gallows, knowledge, war, battle, victory, sorcery, poetry, frenzy, and the runic alphabet, and project him as the husband of the goddess Frigg.

**Bifröst** : In Norse mythology, it is a burning rainbow bridge that reaches between Midgard (Earth) and Asgard, the realm of the gods.

**Kaṇād** : was an ancient Indian natural scientist and philosopher who founded the Vaisheshika school of Hindu philosophy that also represents the earliest physics. The school founded by Kanada explains the creation and existence of the universe by proposing an atomistic theory, applying logic and realism, and is one of the earliest known systematic realist ontology in human history. Apart from this Kaṇāda might have already presented the some laws of motion attributed to Newton, as part of the Vaiśeṣika Sutras.

**Gāṇḍīva** : is a divine bow of Arjuna, one of the pandavas from Hindu epic _Mahabharata._ The bow was made by Brahma.

**Agní** : is a Sanskrit word meaning fire and connotes the Vedic fire god of Hinduism.

**Varuṇa** : is a Vedic deity associated initially with the sky, later also with the seas as well as Ṛta (justice) and Satya (truth).

**Author's Note:**

> Everyone, who did end up reading the whole fic, do let me know your thoughts. I'll be looking forward to your comments. 💋


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